Liberals Lie about Economics

How many ways can a person lie in a single image? To infinity and beyond!

Like most other images floating around social media, this one is full of bovine excrement.

I'm not a huge fan of trickle-down economics. (I'm a Biblical capitalist, meaning I think the government should leave the economy alone to do its own thing except for a debt-erasure every seven years and a real-estate reset every fifty years.) But this image completely misrepresents what trickle-down economics is actually about, demonizes intelligent, hardworking people, and excuses sloth and financial foolishness.

This is trickle-down economics in a nutshell:

• A large-scale employer gets government contracts, tax breaks, or some other favored treatment.
• The employer then has more resources to develop new products, employ more people, and offer higher pay and benefits to existing employees.
• The employer buys more raw material, labor, and services from other employers in order to produce more of its products.
• Those other employers then have more resources to develop new products, employ more people, and offer higher pay and benefits to existing employees.
• The employees of all of these companies have more income available to spend on the products that pay their salaries and invest in the companies that make them.
• Everybody gets richer.

It's generally sound in principle except that it overlooks (or over-simplifies) the market distortions caused by government favoring one producer or industry over another. However, that's not the criticism of the lying liberal who created this image.

The "artist" makes a number of false claims:

1. The people who own and run large corporations get stuff from government programs and use it all up for their own benefit. This is absurd, of course. Those rich folks can't make anything without putting a bunch of not-rich folks to work, and they can't put anyone to work without paying them. They don't just take money from the government and then party all day without passing on any benefit to anyone else. They take that money (or keep more of their own money) and then they use it to buy services, time, and goods from other people like you and me.
2. The rich don't produce anything for anyone except for themselves. Nobody makes anything that nobody else wants. You like your phone and your TV? Thank a billionaire. You like going to work for that Fortune 500 company and getting paid for it? Again, thank a billionaire. Without rich entrepreneurs, industrial visionaries, and venture capitalists, we'd all be scraping out a subsistence living in a local-only economy. No Internet. No highways. No airplanes. No computers. No cars.
3. Poor people are only poor because the rich prevent them from getting anything for themselves. 80% of all poor people are poor because they don't have the drive to get rich. I'm one of them. I like reading and posting crap on the Internet that hardly anyone will ever see. And it is totally my own fault that I'm not filthy rich. I don't care what country you live in, how smart you are, or who your mamma is. If you're poor, chances are very, very good that it's your own fault.
4. If poor people ever get anything from the rich, it's purely by accident. Some people just like accumulating wealth and will do anything to get more of it. However, almost anyone with substantial wealth will tell you that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. Donald Trump has made billions on real estate, but he never could have done it without paying even more billions to painters, plumbers, electricians, carpet layers, and ditch diggers. And he never could have done it without making that real estate available for other people to use at prices that they are willing to pay. If you pay rent (you, not the government, ya freeloader), then you should be paying a rent that is within your budget. If you aren't paying a rent within your budget, then you're making a stupid financial choice that is going to keep you in the poor house. If you are, then you should thank the property owner for making their property available for you to live in. While you're at it, thank them for employing all of those other workers so they can pay their own rent.

Maybe you've heard this one: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor." That includes Hillary Clinton (What? You didn't know she was one of those rich people who were keeping all you po' folks down?) and Donald Trump who provide you with a place to live and a paycheck to pay your rent and buy groceries.

If you don't like the way that works, change your priorities. Quit making excuses for your myopic life choices. Buy your own rental properties or start your own company. Nobody's stopping you except for liberals like yourself who try to make life as difficult as possible for motivated, self-driven people.