Faux News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam

by Allen Clifton

Who remembers the rallying cry of John Boehner and his fellow repugicans of, “Where are the jobs?”  You don’t hear that much anymore, do you?
Well, that’s because we’re on the brink of creating nearly 10 million jobs over the last 5 1/2 years.  In fact, in 2014 we’ve seen some of our best job growth since the Clinton administration.
But there is one main problem with a lot of these positive economic numbers under President Obama – wages are down from where they were before the recession.
Which always brings up the talking point by wingnuts who claim that we’re creating jobs, but they’re low paying jobs.
Are they right?  To an extent, yes.
But is that really the fault of President Obama’s economy?
Well, James Rosen of Faux News seems to think that it is.  He wrote a very “convincing” column concerning how job growth under President Obama has been misleading because the jobs being created aren’t higher paying jobs.
And I bet you’ll be “shocked” to guess what the supposed “answer” to fixing income stagnation is. Deregulation and tax cuts, of course!
You know, the exact same kind of economic philosophy we had prior to our worst economic crash in nearly a century.
Rosen details some of the economic information he found (though, let’s face it, economic numbers are often highly subjective based on how you want to look at them) and how billions of dollars are missing from our economy compared to where we were at prior to the Great Recession.
He quotes Dallas-based economist Pamela Villareal who said, “When you look at the sectors of the economy that have grown since, say, 2011, a lot of the growth has occurred in retail, food service, hospitality. These are sectors that typically pay lower wages. … What we really need is more growth in the higher-paying high-tech jobs, and that could be accomplished by reducing some of the regulations and some of the taxes that are discouraging job growth here in the United States.”
You have to pay careful attention to that last part.  Because while Rosen seems to think it supports his stance on Obama’s economy, it really doesn’t.
Job growth isn’t the problem, it’s wage growth.  So, essentially, her comments don’t make much sense. Besides, taxes are still at historically low levels.  It isn’t as if President Obama raised them all that much.  For a very small percentage of Americans they returned to the levels they were at during the Clinton years.   Many of you might remember those as some of the best economic years in our nation’s history.
Another economist, Jim Diffley, breaks down the economy in a different way.  When talking about income inequality of the last few decades, and during Obama’s presidency, he said, “There’s no particular policies of this administration that drove that change that we can identify.  It tells you about the structure of the economy as it’s evolved over time, over a much longer time than, than Barack Obama has been president. … I often say about presidents and governors that they get too much credit when the economy is good and too much blame when the economy is bad.”
“Over time.”
As in, the last 30+ years when the gap between the top 2 percent and the bottom 98 percent has widened to a historic gap?  Otherwise known as the years of “trickle-down economics.”  When excess wealth at the top was supposed to “trickle down” to the rest of us.  Except it’s done exactly the opposite.
So, here we have James Rosen over at Faux News trying to perpetuate this myth that somehow Obama’s policies have done nothing but kill wage growth, while he actually ends up citing an economist who admits that since the dawn of trickle-down economics income inequality has been a massive problem and nothing he’s seen in Obama’s policy making has had anything to do with wage stagnation.
Because wages have been stagnate for nearly four decades.  
And it’s not as if there’s an issue with wealth or corporate profits in this country.  Corporations are doing fine and the rich are richer than ever before.
So, by the definition of trickle-down economics, we should be experiencing some of our biggest wage growth in years.
But we’re not.
Because trickle-down economics is a scam.  It’s a massive con perpetuated by the rich that somehow convinced millions of middle class and poor Americans that they too could become rich, by giving rich people more money.