You have the greatest memory of anyone on this planet. You can remember such an event that happened 73 years ago? And you were 4 years old? Wow. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were making things up. ------------------------------------------------------------------ I don't think its unusual to remember a traumatic experience as long as you live, provided you don't come down with alzheimer's disease. But thanks for the complement.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html Look at the charts here. Reagan and his disciples killed this country. The National Debt vs GDP was being steadily reduced from WWII through these guys. They sold this country out. None of you Reagan worshipers better say well it is the house that spends. The Whitehouse budgets were LARGER than the house budgets.
Blaming the economic woes of the USA on one single person or even one single administration is incredibly naive.
I disagree the current approach is "trickle down". The biggest effect of the actions has been to keep home prices from plummeting, which if anything is a bubble-up approach.
Keeping house prices from falling keeps them up for the rich and the not-so-rich, so kind of indiscriminate. The foreclosures are more among the not-so-rich, so it's not trickling for them. Henry Ford knew if his workers were poor they couldn't buy anything he was selling. But he was selling something useful that could improve the quality of life for the buyers, so that was the a good thing.
I keep hearing this argument. Dudes, wake up. With emergent markets coming online, corporations don't need your stinking money. They will do what you say, just not here in the USofA. The US is nearly in depression, and corporate earnings have never been higher. IBM just keeps buying back stock like there is no tomorrow. So let's see, I can either hire 3 billion Chinese and Indians for $25 a day, sell them an SBUX coffee and an MCD hamburger for 1/3 of what I sell it in the US, and still do ok. Nice! Numbers add up. MAJOR CACHINGO!
In a sense that's true, however the principle residence has much higher relative importance for those outside the top quartile.
Ford was selling a means to leverage cheap petro - a unique moment in time. IMO, most of modern economics will get thrown under the bus as we realize just how much its theories had an underlying assumption of cheap, abundant energy. Measures like productivity etc were never really about productivity, they were proxies for "how many more barrel-equivalents can I burn today relative to yesterday".
Trickle down or trickle up is wealth redistribution any way you cut it. wealth redistribution of any form is not sustanable over the long term. The only distributioin of weath that is sustainable is when capital is vountarily organized. "The trickle down economics staw man" http://bidhitter.com/observations/the-trickle-down-economics-straw-man/