President tells labor that trickle down has never happened in this country
In Milwaukee Tuesday President Obama gave a speech at something called Laborfest. It was full of soaring rhetoric such as:
“Now, anybody who thinks that we can move this economy forward with just a few folks at the top doing well, hoping that it’s going to trickle down to working people who are running faster and faster just to keep up, you’ll never see it. (Applause.) If that’s what you’re waiting for, you should stop waiting, because it’s never happened in our history. That’s not how America was built. It wasn’t built with a bunch of folks at the top doing well and everybody else scrambling. We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn’t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell. We did it with sweat and effort and innovation. (Applause.) We did it on the assembly line and at the construction site. (Applause.)”
I’m not sure what history he’s exposed to, but I seem to recall many of this country’s successes were spurred by entrepreneurs who innovated and invented, then hired people at ever increasing wages because they had to compete against other entrepreneurs.
Ben Franklin was a successful printer. Paul Revere was a silversmith. Sam Adams was a successful brewer. Others were planters and traders.
Later we had steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, oil baron John D. Rockefeller, railroad czars Cornelius Vanderbilt and Henry Flagler, financier J.P. Morgan, car maker Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison.
There also were newspaper empires built by such men as William Randolph Hearst, Horace Greeley, John Knight, James Cox and Donald W. Reynolds.
Today we have computer genius Bill Gates, retailer Sam Walton, entertainer Oprah Winfrey, fast food kingpin Ray Kroc, Internet seller Jeff Bezos and gadget man Steve Jobs.
Those are the folks at the top who created empires supported by those on the assembly lines and construction sites.
Central planning never worked. Giving people opportunity did.
Trickle down comment is at 14:15:
