Trickle-Up Economy

Here in The Netherlands we have a tax refund policy called "rent subsidy," which is a tax refund provided to people who rent a house or a room but don't have a sufficient income. This is part of our social safety net, which also includes other social benefits.

While we've had decades of governments and rich people telling us how we live in a "trickle-down" economy, it's actually the other way around, and the social benefits play an important role in that scheme. You see, when governments say that they're going to help the poor and the working poor, it's not really for them. Dutch people receive the rent subsidy to help them pay for their rent, so it seems that the policy exists to help them. But it's not; it's to help the landlords. Often times this rent subsidy is paid directly to those landlords.

Businesses like Amazon and Wallmart pay many of their employees below subsistence wages. They can do this because these employees are eligible to apply for food stamps. It's not that the government helps those employees per se, it's that they fund Amazon and Wallmart by making it possible for them to get away with paying far too low wages. When the financial meltdown happened in 2008, the Central Banks of the world made available free money, or cheap money at least, to the businesses that were deemed "too big to fail," like banks, insurance companies, the auto industries and so on. Instead they could have used the trickle-up principle: distribute money directly to the people who couldn't pay their mortgages, so they could pay the mortgages; that money would end up in the banks eventually anyway, just like the rent subsidy ends up at the landlords here in The Netherlands.

"How will we pay for that," or "who will pay for that" are questions that are always asked as soon as money is needed to help citizens. When policies are proposed that would actually help people, that would make them more free, enable them to take a risk, like change jobs because their health insurance isn't tied to that job anymore, these questions are always asked and the proposal is voted away. Only when the upper echelons of society need money, or when the military needs the money, these questions are never asked. It's all trickle-up, the game is rigged to increase the wealth gap by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Even the social safety nets ultimately benefit the rich, as they enable them to keep screwing over the rest of us.

These are topics I've written about many times already, but linked below is a highly interesting discussion from Jon Stewart's podcast in which these and related topics are expanded upon. Jon and his guests explain very clearly how monetary and fiscal policies are used now and how they could be used differently to make possible the policies we all want, like universal healthcare, free education, eliminating existing student debts, affordable housing and so on. The money is there, the wealth is there. Free market advocates always say that they don't want the government to pick winners and losers in the economy, when the reality is that governments ALWAYS pick winners and losers; it's just that they always pick the same people...

You know what it is? We always talk we live in a free market system. But nothing about this system seems free market to me. It seems to be intervened on at all different angles. It's only that if you intervene on behalf of workers, is THAT called 'socialism'...

That quote from Jon Stewart is so true. There's no such thing as a free market, and capitalism is an expressly political economic system; it's just a matter of choosing different winners, that's all.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, stay safe, stay healthy!