Economic data for the past fifty years proves trickle-down works. It works too well. Just ask the majority of Americans. It works to keep mobility down. It works to keep worker's income down. It works to keep worker's optimism down. It works to keep down a united unionized workforce. It creates stagnation for most of the nation. That must be why Republicans refuse to offer or support any other progressive reform ideas for taxation or leveling income inequality. Consequently, the wealth gap keeps growing within a shrinking demographic at a cancer hungry rate.
It's not just wandering nomad urban youths or those fitting some perverse under-employed racial profile feeling the "man's" heat from "stop and frisk" crime busting strategies. Workers are being stopped and frisked at the paycheck line, in the perk department, and at the job security estate planning market. The term Reaganomics may have faded but his revolution still holds the center hostage. That was until Bill de Blasio "Flash Gordoned" into the political banquet. Mr. New York Mayor of the United States is an unapologetic populist, a progressive, and a large man living as example of a truer picture of America in the twenty-first century. Can we finally flush Reaganomics where it belongs?
Skeptics, you know, the same proprietors of our status quo will ask is this really the time? There are big retail layoffs and big name retail stores such as Best Buy with tanking stock values. Is it really the best time for five days of paid sick leave for work sites with more than five employees, to raise the minimum wage to ten or even fifteen dollars an hour, to raise the tax rates on incomes above the gravity free level of $500,000, to enact a national holiday for voting, to do it right with universal health care at honest affordable rates, to finance unquestionable above standard education from pre-school to a high school diploma, to guarantee low college loan rates, and mandate a fair mortgage for "a mule and forty acres home is my castle" free and clear from drone or any NSA surveillance, or petty police policy of stop and frisk?
Absolutely, yes, it is time. There is no better time to sooth and calm a restless community starved society. Too much humanity has been sacrificed over a failed economic program. It is true that many folks should have listened to their parents and or teachers and done a better job at preparing for the future. You cannot fix income inequality in a way that honors our cultural foundations, but that is no reason to not build a solid floor to support the community of this amazing rich and potentially enlightened society. There is no shortage of wealth in America. It is just that trickle-down is drought.
Unless we want an America that is a tale of two cities, a tale of two nations, a "Downton Abby America on steroids," then let's hope that the refreshing message of progressives such as Bill de Basio seize the moment, and the public votes a stop and frisk of Reaganomics.