President Obama, amazingly, talks as if he dislikes “trickle-down ideology.” This is amazing because his entire economic program involves giving money to big businesses in the hope this money will trickle down.
Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias put it well when Obama was pushing his “new economic patriotism” during the campaign. If you want to help the working class, Yglesias wrote:
I use the image of “feeding the horses to feed the birds,” and point out that Obama’s subsidies for Boeing, Pfizer, General Electric, and Archer Daniels Midland are more deserving of the name “trickle-down” than flattening out the tax code is.
George Will makes similar points in a great column this weekend on how Obama has begun to notice how government works, but is very far from figuring out how to fix it:
[Government] becomes a bigger dispenser of inequality through benefits to those sufficiently clever and connected to work its levers. …
Government’s dignity diminishes as government grows to serve factions of those sophisticated at manipulating its allocation of preferences.
