The Windfall

It's not that I don't think trickle-down economics can work, it's just that it never actually has, not one time ever in the history of human economic activity. The track record is stark, but look, it took opposable thumbs billions of years to actually show up on any earthbound mammals after persistently and stubbornly not-existing for literally all of prehistory up to that point. But then when they did show up, boy howdy did we take those evolutionary lemons, grip them firmly and squeeze them in our fists until we made us some... well, not lemonade because refined cane sugar wouldn't show up for another several million years, but a mashy, wet, sour pulp of lemons that would be easier to eat than if we hadn't crushed them at all probably.

And that's how human progress works: opportunity presents itself and we use that opportunity to destroy a thing that would otherwise be useful in any other context or application. Humans are creators and innovators nonpareil, but the making of a thing usually involves reconstituting existing parts, which of course you can't do without smashing the old thing to zillions of painful little bits to liberate the parts you need.

And sometimes the parts you need are the sense of safety and well-being of a vulnerable portion of your fellow human beings, or better, your actual countrymen and immediate neighbors. It's not personal, it's just that they're close to hand. And economic systems, while expanding their scope and reach across borders and oceans at 4G LTE speeds and beyond, are still at least partially closed. Yes, it's possible I guess to affect change that will fuck with the petrodollar ecosystem and really make things marginally more expensive in Venezuela someday, but it's way more invigorating and exciting to steal food out of the mouths of your own suffering poor because we can more rationally convince ourselves that the outcomes are zero-sum. Whatever they have is necessarily something I now can't. While that's also abstractly true of the starving people of Venezuela, they're way outside the range of the reach of a swift, American corporate boot.

Attacking, even criminalizing, poverty is part of the American political rhetorical DNA. There is no amount of evidence that will ever fully purge the lie of the "takers" or of the invisible, giving hand of the "benevolent corporation." There will always be a segment of our society that sees poverty as a communicable disease. But not communicable like the flu, invisible and persistent like socialism, avoidable but impossible to ever really see coming. No, poverty is communicable like rabies: you have to get bit by the Poverty Wombat, cunning and silent and always stalking, but still fightable, defeatable if only its target has the muscle and mind or a massive loan from their very rich dad to either beat it into submission or to simply grow up in a clean and lovely place sequestered from the Poverty Wombat hunting grounds. And both approaches, by the way, are worthy of the exact same amount of celebration and praise somehow.

Are corporations actually evil? Maybe not essentially, at the constitutive level. Only in the practical application of problem-solving on a scale that is indifferent to human feeling, up to and including suffering and death. Corporations consider people the way people consider bowel flora. They know we exist and that we're vaguely important, but they're not really sure how we work or what exactly our benefit to the system as a whole is. Economics is pretend. Money is pretend. The collective fiction of dollars and profit are only ever one bubble-burst away from disappearing in a sudden inrush of soapy air. Again.

But we keep trying. And corporations--which are people, remember!--keep trying to help. Another stab at trickle-down economic policy? Everyone gets a raise! Everyone gets a bonus! They like their handouts and want to make a big enough show to let people know just how much their handout worked exactly as advertised. The subsequent announcement of layoffs a day or two later, well, it's unfortunate, but hey! Remember that first thing we said, about the bonuses?!

The results are never going to be as important as the lie, I'm realizing though. Because the lie is comfortable. It's aspirational. Some day, the rich guy is going to be me. If someone who likes to lie by implication about whether or not he has an MBA from the Wharton school can one day go bankrupt several times over, make himself a pariah among all domestic moneylending institutions, be openly racist and still become president one day, then I say fuck the poor too. Even while I'm still one of them. The trickle-down doesn't work, we know, but by the time it was supposed to trickle down to me, I'll be one of the rich ones getting the big fat tax cut anyway probably. As long as I'm white and preferably not Haitian, I guess?