ROOSEVELT AND TRICKLE DOWN

Here is Franklin Roosevelt’s, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and in it I found this quote:

There are two ways of viewing the Government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776

I did not know that Roosevelt had made such a direct criticism of what we now are used to hearing as trickle down economics

What Roosevelt did was to overthrow an economic system.

That same system of Neoliberalism, lasses faire, Reaganism, predator capitalism, RICO capitalism that began to be re implemented during the Carter Administration with that administrations various deregulation schemes and the appointment of Paul Volcker and continues, unabated, to this very day.

It is not a new idea. In the US, in the 1890's, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, it was called the Horse and Sparrow theory: "if you feed enough oats to a horse some will pass through to feed the sparrows". Comedian Will Rogers quipped that if you put gold at the top of the economy it will float there.

We are now at a very similar time in history. We will either get a Roosevelt or a Hoover. As long as Obama is reappointing the likes of Berneke, Gaithner and Summers, he is not Roosevelt.