Who knew Robert Reich had all the answers?

Former Treasury Secretary Reich has a spot on NPR where he pontificates about how he knows for sure that there is one and only one secret to successful economic policy and he knows the secret. The other day he was trying like a little engine to prove the conservative “Trickle Down” has no validity and will never help anyone and that only the liberal “Trickle Up” will ever work.

He started by saying that it was President Bush’s plan to give tax cuts to the wealthy and then pray they invest the windfall in plants and factories in the U.S., creating jobs and thusly stimulating the economy. Mr. Reich do you really think you’re that slick or we’re that gullible? Bush gave tax cuts to everyone who pays income tax. Reich is purposefully repeating the Democrat mantra in order to perpetuate the class warfare Democrats rely upon for votes. The best way to convince someone that your argument is valid is to falsely characterize the other position. Reich’s motives for this are transparent as the rest of his argument is incongruous.

He went on to say that we now live in a global marketplace and that it is likely the rich will take their tax rebates (i.e. their own money) and invest it overseas. Those of us who believe in free markets do believe that capital will eventually seek an optimal outlet – overseas is just one possibility. Surprisingly, this is considered a bad thing by Mr. Reich. I’m sure that it would be a good thing if this money was never returned to the citizen who earned it and instead sent to a foreign country through USAID. More typically Leftist ideology – the government knows what to do with your money better than you do. Reich defines Americans directing money in overseas investment as undesirable. In 2000, President Clinton said,

We cannot accept a world in which part of humanity lives on the cutting edge of a new economy, and the rest live on the bare edge of survival. I think we have to do our part to change that - with expanded trade, expanded aid, and the expansion of freedom.

I quote President Clinton to show that Reich's diatribe only reveals what he wants you to see. If you want to invest in the developing world, you're evil. The Government taking your money through extortion and giving it to the developing world, that's good.

He then goes on to define the “trickle up” leftist strategy as investing in the health and education of the American people in order to make them more productive that naturally leads to an increasing standard of living. First, how could increasing life expectancy from 87 to 90+ do anything but bankrupt Social Security faster? Second, I’ve read story after story regretting the fact that even white-collar jobs are being exported overseas. This morning on NPR they mentioned that computer programming jobs were being sent to India because a programmer there could be upper middle class on $900 per month. Putting two and two together, even if we had a better educated workforce, unless they were willing to work for $12,000 per year, the job would be going to India. So then, exactly how does trickle up work? It kinda sound like the Russia of today -- healthy PhD's running around and working at McDonalds.

The only solace I take is that most of Western Europe has a more generous social welfare state, economies growing at a fraction of the rate of the US and birth rates that indicate complete depopulation within a few generations. We’ll be watching those countries precede us down the slide of irrelevancy unless someone figures out that the government cannot be all things to all people.