Who's to blame when nothing trickles down?

From Sunday's Virginian-Pilot. This started out referencing Hank Williams' "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It." No matter how you slice it, someone isn't getting his fair share, whether it be beer or wages.

Capitalism under President Obama has fared better than ever before.

Corporate America is sitting on between three and five trillion dollars of cash reserves stashed in American banks and overseas accounts.

The top 1% of the top 1%—that’s .01% have done even better in the last thirty years. This group of the top 400 billionaires, plus those billionaires left over who couldn’t quite break into the top 400, what I like to refer to as the poorer billionaires, sit at the head of America’s corporate boards. In 1979, there were about three billionaires.

At first glance, the country seems to be doing pretty well under its first Socialist president. Certainly better than anyone would have guessed. Corporate taxes are lower than ever, corporate incentives—they don’t like the term loop holes—are higher than ever at $92 billion, and corporate profits are going through the roof.

The only aspect of Capitalism that isn’t working, as luck would have it, is that aspect that actually affects the workers—the trickle-down.

Apparently—and you would have to ask the CEOs why this is—but apparently nothing is trickling down. It appears as if everything is being sucked up. In 2013, the average CEO salary was $13.9 million, a 9% increase over 2012 while the average minimum wage worker took home about $15,000, the same as he did in 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

Half of the workers earning that minimum wage were over the age of 25. They weren’t teenagers earning movie money.

Investors have done as well as CEOs. Apparently, raising their tax rates a few points hasn’t discouraged them to the point where they don’t even want to get out of bed in the morning. That’s a good thing because America does need investors. These so called job creators do have a role to play in the free market.

Job creators are important. But job creators are not more important than the people doing the jobs.

While the right wing attacks Socialist America and the left wing attacks Capitalist America, maybe common sense America should be leading the charge against the real culprits—greedy America.

Everyone from Reagan to Roosevelt, Carry Nation to Tea Party Nation, Rand Paul to Paul Ryan to Paul Bunyan should know what greed is. Greed is what’s doing the country in. No defender of Capitalism should be a defender of greed.


Workers, both employed and unemployed, aren’t the only victims of greed even though they bear the biggest burden. Capitalism is also victim. A free market system that is justifiably the envy of the whole world is being sabotaged by those at the top who want to milk it dry before even a trickle can escape.

By definition, free-market capitalism is nothing more than an economic system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy. Shouldn’t taking care of workers, so the government doesn’t have to, be a major goal of Capitalism?

Preventing workers from experiencing the rewards of the free-market system is practically holding the door open and begging government to walk in. Redistribution is an ugly word we hear a lot. Well, CEOs paying themselves exorbitant salaries while the workers who helped create that money have to seek government aid is the first act of redistribution.

When President Reagan first brought up the trickle-down theory, it met with a lot of criticism from workers who didn’t want to equate their paycheck with a leak in a bucket. They thought their wages should be scooped out of the top of the bucket like their bosses were doing. But what was bad enough got worse when the holes in the bucket started getting smaller and their share dwindled.

Today, Greeders are taking so much out of the buckets that there is very little left to trickle down. The tiniest of holes—the minimum wage holes, are a joke.

Maybe it’s time to put more holes in the bucket, make the holes bigger, and leave more in the bucket.

Or maybe we should let workers scoop their beer out of the top of the bucket the way CEOs and job creators do. That’s the way Capitalism was supposed to work.