SYSK Selects: How Trickle-Down Economics Works

to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and they're snickering and tittering, and that makes this stuff you should know. Yeah, we've got sidetracked before. We talking about things that trickle. Names, names that trickle. Yes, like the famous race car driver Dick Trickle. You say, road dude, I swear to God look him up. I will don't image search and just look him up. Okay, guys specify race car. Yeah, okay, that's a good idea.

You're a Google master with your Google Foo. Yes, and we the three of us, are apparently all eight years old again. Uh, speaking of trickle, Chuck, Hey, happy birthday. That would be quiet. Jerry, you have a big mouth. You're always talking. Well, I usually remember, but I don't didn't today, So happy birthday. Thank you. I appreciate it. And this will be out several weeks later, but all right, I'll get to relive my birthday all over again. Thanks man.

Have you Chuckers ever seen the movie Ferris Peeler's Day Off? Yeah, and then we'd go there at some point in this one. Yeah, because of ben Stein. Yeah, okay, good, so you know the answer then something the economics. Anyone who do economics? Yeah, they're an ECON class. The guy who says Bueller Bueller, that's ben Stein. Remember he had that show when ben Stein's money which was really his money? Yeah it was,

wasn't it. I think it was like yeah, I think maybe like they gave it to him if it wasn't one or came out of a salary, who knows. Um. But before that show came on, he was in Farriss Bueller's Day Off as an ECON professor. And I believe he does have a degree in economics. He's also just a great actor and vizine pitchman. But what he was talking about in there, he was clear eyes clear, I thank you, clear is awesome. Yeah, that's right, that sounded like not ben Stein. Well that was my That's as

steiny as I get. Anyway, he was talking about voodoo economics, and voodoo economics was another name for trickle down economics a k a. Reaganomics. And the person who coined the term voodoo economics do you know John Hughes, No, Yeah, it was George Bush Senior. H W I remember that. Yeah.

He he was running in the primaries against Reagan and for the election before he came on as his vice president, and he was deriding Reagan's economic policies, specifically his belief and trickle down economics as voodoo economics because there's some apparently, some sort of magic to the whole thing that makes it work rather than sound economic principle. Yeah, it occurred to me today when I was studying the stuff that John Hughes picked this very topic to represent the most

boring thing you could talk about. I guess so. And uh, it took me a few times to to figure it out, because you know, I don't My brain doesn't skew towards understanding economics. It's it's tough to do. But I finally did, and I was like, you know what it's not the most boring thing ever, It's uh, it's pretty interesting. If I came around. That means anyone can now it's just our um our burden to make it interesting to everybody else,

which we've already failed that spectacular. That's right. So let's talk about this idea first of all, trickle down economics. UM will explain the whole thing in detail starting in just a moment, but we should probably say that the disclaimer if you want to drive a fiscal conservative or a conservative economists, or just a conservative in general crazy mentioned trickle down economics, like call what they call supply side economics trickle down economics. It drives some bonkers. There's like,

there's no such thing as trickle down economics. It's a derisive term. It's um it doesn't capture the spirit or the thought behind supply side economics, which is what they've come around to call it. But back in the day

it was definitely called trickle down economics. And the whole point, the reason why it was called trickle down economics is that the idea behind it is if you place wealth with the wealthiest people, this idea goes, they will take that money and invested into the economy, which will get things running again. And as a result, that economic engine revving up will create more wealth at the top that

trickles down to the lower working and middle classes. Yeah, Like who better to stimulate the economy than the super rich, and they will like maybe open a business to put people to work, and then those workers will benefit and uh, directly from that investment that that person made. Right, So this is the whole tree behind it. We should also disclaim even further that economics as a field is so

far from science it's preposterous. Um. Most economic theory that you ever will run into from John Maynard Keynes or Adam Smith or um, John Baptiste, Um. These guys are talking about pure economies the United States, and I don't think there's any economy in the world that is a pure economy, free market economy. The United States has things like tariffs, and um, we have things like government intervention, tax policy, monetary policy. There's intervention in the market. So

you can't ever say. We can't say, really what causes recessions and what brings us out of them, or whether trickle down economics is effective or if it's not, or if it is effective. Is it effective in the long run or the short run? And what about the opposite way, is that effective in the long run or the short run? We don't know. That is the thing. That's why like

this kind of stuff can get people's blood boiling. So like the point of this one is to just talk about trickle down economics and the theory behind it and why it may or may not work, and um, on the caveat that we don't know, and neither do economists. Yeah, I think I left this at a little frustrated after my research because I thought I would come away with

an answer. Um. But I mean, if you look up reagonomics, which is another name for Reagan's version of the supply side economics, you will find article, well more than that, but hundred articles on how what a great success it was, and then the abject failure of reagonomics, and no one is going to agree. I looked at some of these theories and said, well, that makes sense in an ideal world. Then I look at the opposite and think, well that

makes sense in an ideal world. And I don't. I don't know if you, like you said, I don't know if you can I don't know if there is an answer. Even though everyone thinks that they're right, both people can't be right both sides. No, it's true because these are very opposite in most cases ideas. Yeah, but what I did find was a bunch of articles after digging further that said the failures and successes of Reaganomics. And I think to me that's probably a little more accurate because

it is in a black and white situation. Well, the part of the problem is is if you point to Reagan's text policies, right, and and Reagan is tied to trickle down economics. We'll get into the history, like we'll clear all this up. But he's not really the first one to implement this, but he's he's tied to it. But if you look at Reaganomics, the problem is this, chuck.

If if you say, well, the nineties were very prosperous with the dot com boom um and the the Nasdaq hit like like a record ten thousand points at like in the nineties, all that was from Reagan's policies, Well you can't say that that was from Reagan's policies. We we don't know. We just simply don't know. Was it something short term that the Clinton administration was doing, or was it the long term effects of Reagan's tax cuts.

We don't know, and we're going to get scores of email from people saying what we do know, but we don't know, so just send your email. It's fine, but you're wrong. Uh. Well, I guess we should go ahead and say too that just The name trickle down was coined by Will Rogers famous Humorus in the nineteen twenties. It is not a nineteen eighties thing. It had been around for a while, and he said, quote, the money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it

would trickle down to the needy. And that's where it started to get. It. U a derogatory feel around that name, for sure, since the twenties and and over time, um, especially since the eighties, the people who champion trickle down economics or this this particular version of trickle down tax policy have tried to distance themselves from the term trickle down because it does seem elitist and it seems like a big wealth transfer, which in fact it is. UM.

Let's let's talk about this. Trickled own policy isn't necessarily um associated with Reagan's tax cuts. The whole idea behind trickle down, as I said already, is you take wealth and you give it to the wealthiest people. That's that's what's done. It's a wealth transfer, and it's usually done at a time when you're in an economic slump, so you're hoping to revitalize things. Yeah, it's the government trying to smooth out the rough spots in the national economy,

like a k A. Recessions. Um, so you're transferring wealth. You're transferring wealth though on the premise that that money is going to be reinvested, reinvigorated, used to reinvigorate the economy. Right, So it is a wealth transfer, but with the one we're talking about today specifically, Um, we're talking about Reagan's version. So it's a wealth transferred through tax cuts. Right. So when Reagan came into office, Uh, he took over a tax policy, see where the highest tax rate was like

seventy the highest earners were paying sev on their highest income. Yeah, and he got that down to about fifty. Yeah, which is still seems incredibly high today in an age where we're paying like thirty the highest earners are. So the point is is Reagan did it through text cuts. Yeah, but the that doesn't mean like trickle down economics don't doesn't equal text cuts necessarily, it's down. It's that's that's one way of putting more money into the hands of

the wealthiest, right Exactly. It's really a question of supply and demand. And I guess we can go back through time a little bit to John Baptis, say who you mentioned, uh, nineteenth century French economists, and his his philosophy has been misinterpreted a lot as supply creates its own demand. It's not exactly right. What he was really saying is products are paid for with products, and money just had like

a temporary function. Um. Yeah, Like if you are somebody who produces something, when you produce that something, that item, when you go make that shoe, and you're gonna sell your shoe, which is for the whole reason you made the shoe in the first place, and then with that money you can go use it to buy other goods and services. So the production of that shoe created a wage for you, which in turn stimulated consumption demand from you for something else. Yeah, product is paid for the product.

The misinterpretation that supply creates its own demand is is just a bastardized version, and that basically means that there would never be a failed product, like you can just produce and produce and produce, which isn't sound No, that's insane. And I think Say would have said that that is not true as well. Well he did, he did um during his lifetime even say like well, no, I mean there it's possible that there is such thing is over production. Sure.

I mean, like if you think about it, like during the uh the housing market crash, Yeah, it's starting a few years ago. There was a glut of homes on the market. And it's not like the people who are building homes just merrily went on building homes and building

homes and building homes. Like once the demand ceased, they stopped producing and we still had a glut on the market and the ones who were still just sinking money and to build like building just stop basically, and it was because there was an oversupply because demand had ceased. So the idea that that if you if you produce it, demand will come on a short term basis is this kind of a fallacy. Yeah, But in the earlier days of this country, a lot of big thinkers agreed with

him like Jefferson. Um. But the tide turned later on in our country with the introduction of Mr Keynes KEENSI and economics. Yeah, so we talked about in our audio book. We did Stuff you should know, super stuff Guide to the Economy, which is probably super outdated, I wonder, but there are some I think there's some evergreen content in there. Yeah, I mean it was like an economics one on one course with us UM. But so so, the basis of Says law is that if you stimulate UM production, then

you'll get the economy going again. And it was implemented for a while like some of the some of the early twentieth century presidents like Hoover, among others like Harding

and Coolidge J Well JFK. Later, but early on in the twentieth century, Harding and Coolidge both implemented UM this kind of what's called supply side policy text policy right where where if you stimulate production through lowering taxes at the top, and we'll tell you in a second how those two are correlated, Um, you can at the economy going yet Well, Hoover also followed the same policy, and

under Hoover's watch, the Great depression happen. Yeah, which would cause any just regular thinking person, even if they don't understand economics, to think, hey, we're doing it wrong. So Roosevelt came along, That's right. Roosevelt held the opposite view, and he was very much a Kinesian and he was operating at the same time that Keynes was writing and working himself. And John Maynard Kaine said, no, no, no, you guys have it backwards. You don't stimulate the supply,

you stimulate the demand. Then all of a sudden, if you have a housing glut and you suddenly have people who have more money to spend, they'll take care of your housing glut and then things can get back to normal. We reach equilibrium again. Yeah. He was about, uh, short term ideas, short term fixes, maybe lower interest rates, maybe taxes, fiscal policy, taxes and spending. Basically what you hear a

lot of obout these days. It. You know, Keynesian economics kind of lasted a long time until probably Kennedy and then Reagan. It's like there's only been a handful of US presidents really endorse the trickle down theory. Yeah, like

wholeheartedly since the twentieth century. Um, so Yeah, it's the Kenzie and policies ruled, and it was very much about like cutting taxes for the lower and middle and working classes, increasing taxes for the rich because if you if you're a government, you still need revenue, right, So you can't just cut Texas for everybody. If you cut Texas for one group, you kind of need to increase it for

another because you still need your money coming in. Of course, you could also take the radical step of figuring out how to eliminate waste and blow in government. That would help a lot, but we're not talking about that in this one. We're talking about trickle down economics. So then along comes Kennedy who says, hey, or my dad was pretty rich, so I'm kind of thinking that this trickle down thing might work, right, So he got into supply side economics. And then when Reagan came along, he really

championed this whole idea. And it was out of a result of some guys in the seventies saying, um, there's this whole other thing that we've been ignoring, which is this trickle down tax policy that we should implement, and they got Reagan into it and he implemented it. Yeah, and Uh, after this message break coming up here in a sec we're going to talk a little bit about If it doesn't sound like it makes sense to you, there's a certain curve that will explain that might clear

it up for you. All right, So we're gonna talk about the Laugher curve, which was also in Ferry Spueller. Oh was it? Yeah, he says, Laugher curve. But in high school had no idea. But no, I was like, what are those words together? I don't understand. Laugher was a person l A F F e er and Um. The Laugher curve helps explain a little bit why trickle down economics could possibly work. Is that a good neutral

way to say that? I always say so. Uh. The idea of the Laugher curd curve is that the relationship between taxes and revenues is a curve instead of a direct relationship. So at a certain point, let's say you own a company making choose and you grows ten million dollars through like the first two financial quarters, and your tax that let's say, and you know, if you make any more money, then you're gonna jump up into that

tax uh, tax category. You might slow down production you might halt the production altogether and say, you know what, I'm gonna take off the rest of the year, maybe even put these people out of work for four to six months furlow, and because I don't want to be taxed anymore. So if you look at that on a graph, it's gonna be if you text people, they're not gonna work. If you text people zero percent, you're not getting any money. So in the middle of there is the curve, right it.

Basically Laugher's curve suggests that the correlation between UM tax rates and tax revenue is not totally positive. At some point, it starts to go back down. Yeah, that's called the prohibitive range. At a certain point, people don't want to be text in that range. Yeah, And it's not even necessarily that they are not working any longer because they resent being taxed. What Laugher was pointing out is that there is this prohibitive range, and within the prohibitive range, UM,

you remove the incentive to work. Theoretically, where UM and Jay mcgrathre wrote this, UH gave a pretty good UM example where it's like, if you make that money and you are text, that's tolerable you're still gonna make. You still get to keep fifty percent for yourself. But when you're texting that ninety percentile, uh, you're let's say you were going to make another million dollars, you to give nine thousand of it to the government. You just get

to keep a hundred thousand. Well, you might decide to just go and spend the rest of the year at your beach house with the money that you did make, not because you resent being texted, because it's just not worth it to to exert that effort to make that next million dollars when you just get to keep a hundred thousand of it. So at that point in that prohibitive range, the tax policy is effectively keeping people from working, inducing them to not work any longer, which is bad

for an economy. And that's if you're if your work, if your income is directly related to your work, right, you could considerably if you owned a factory or something, and you didn't have to really exert any problems and you could still make payroll and all that stuff, it might be worth it to just leave it to these other people to make that extra hundred thousand dollars for you, rather than go off to the beach house. But if you your effort directly um is tax, then yes, it

would become a distance and toward work. Conceivably, we should point out Chuck and Jane didn't do a very good job of doing that in this In this article, Laugher's curve is a thought experiment. It's not based on data. It's not um a hard and fast rule or a law. It's basically an intuitive idea of tax rates and their effect on tax revenue. Yeah, but if you don't even have to be a business owner, Let's say you're just a regular employee that makes a salary, you have a

salary sweet spot as well. You know, if it's great to get promotions and to get raises, but if you're really climbing the ladder at a certain point, you might think, man, I got a big raise, and I'm making barely any more money than I made before this big promotion because I've been kicked into a higher tax bracket. So that's the prohibitive range, and it, you know, can apply to you.

I mean you can't. You don't stop working. No, But you may say I don't actually want their promotion because it's going to be more responsibility and really out much more money. So I'm going to hang out right here rather than keep going in my little range or whatever it is. So that's Laugher's curve, and that's a it's a kind of the basis of trickle down tax policy. It's the idea that, Okay, there is a point where you can text too much and now you're actually slowing

down the economy. So based on Laugher's curve, when you're looking at it through um through trickle down policy, there's a point. Then that's that, like you said, there's a sweet spot as far as text revenue goes. And it creates this seeming paradox where if you cut tax rates at a certain point, you'll actually increase tax revenue because people will be incentivized to work more throughout the year. And the other basis of trickle down theory is that you are going to put more money or keep more

money with the people at the wealthiest. People who under this idea are more likely to um invest it back into the economy, right, and when they do that, supposedly allegedly the economy booms. Yeah, what you can account for is just the single person. This has looked at in the broadest terms, because somebody could make all their money and just sit on it in the bank, which isn't reinvesting it. That is a really, really, really big point.

You'll remember back at the beginning of this recession, the FED was doing everything it could to cheapen lending and still has been, and uh, it didn't do anything. Come on, like, you have to take into account things like um insecurity, fear, um being hum yes, being human, like, we're not necessarily rationally maximizing actors. Humans are like, there is such thing as fear and the idea that maybe hoarding money is best.

So what's possible then if you follow this trickle down tax policy, is you're taking money from everybody else and giving it to the rich. Or if your head to spun because you're a fiscal conservative, what you're doing is allowing the rich to keep more of their income, but they're not doing anything with it right at least as a short term fixed that's not a good idea because you can probably bet that eventually the rich are going to take that money and invest it back in the economy.

But it's not. Yes, but when's that going to happen? You can't really say. And part of the other problem with it is is that you are then also basically handing money out at a fire sale. You're saying, Hey, here's a bunch of money invested back in the economy. And have we mentioned the bargain basement rates you can get on all of these businesses over here because the economy is in a recessional Yeah, very much, so, you know.

And it's it's like it is literally a wealth transfer, and under some circumstances like the recession that we're still coming out of now, it is a wealth transfer and an asset transfer, and that the people who have the most money, the wealthy, also have the most buying power

and they have the best bargains. Yeah. Thomas Sowell is a is an economist and he um he won't call it trickle down economics because he thinks it literally benefits the workers immediately and first because in the idealized version, they're gonna reinvest in. The very first thing that's going to happen is they're gonna put people to work and people are gonna have obs. Uh. So, yeah, you won't. He's not gonna call it trickle down theory because he

thinks it works literally the opposite way now here. I read a column in the National Review by him, and he's like, you will never find a legitimate economist, um a history of economic theories and policies and analysis. You'll never find trickle down economics anywhere. Like it drives him crazy that people call it that because it has such

a negative association, an elitist, wealthy association. Yeah. And you know, when you if you're during election time or during if you see these big tax cuts for the wealthy, if it makes your blood boil because you think they're these people are obviously in the hip pocket of the politician. That may be true, but you can still remove yourself from that and look at the theory itself and does it work or does it not? And we will do

that after this message. So check. Let's let's do just that, um passionless rundown of how it trickled down supply side tax policy works. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be passionless with me because I have no idea. I can't argue hard for any side because I read so many articles disputing one another completely that I have no idea. So okay, so you're we're in a recession, and there's a discussion is it supply or dem man that you want to stimulate. Well, with supply side economics, trickle down

is what you call it in the vernacular. You want to stimulate the supply because under this belief, if you stimulate the supply, the um the people who are producing stuff will have stuff for sale and people will buy it, and more money will enter the economy and things will get back to normal because the basis of this is that people still work during recessions, and since they're working,

they have money to buy things. Not everybody's working. But you can handle the idea that not everybody's working by getting production going again, because that creates jobs and that in turn generates even more income passionless. So how do you do that, According to trickle down supply side tax policy,

you cut the tax rates of the wealthiest people. You incentivize them to keep working harder and harder because they get to keep more and more of it themselves on the hope that rather than keeping it themselves hoarding, they will inject it into the economy through things like investing, expanding their businesses, hiring more people, opening new businesses, and taking that investment and making more money themselves, but in the meantime spreading the wealth around through things like wages

and tax revenues through minimum wages. So that is supply side tax policy, and whether it works or not, the jury is still out. I did find something from um fair Economy dot Org, which I have to say, I don't know whether they're nonpartisan or liberal. They definitely didn't strike me as conservative, but um so take it however

you want. But they took the UM tax rates, the top tax rate and it's changes from nineteen fifty four to two thousand two, and they took the changes to that tops tech top tex rate, the highest tier, which is the one you're supposed to cut under this this type of tax policy, and they juxtaposed it against four different economic indicators growth in the gross domestic product, which is kind of like the indicator of the overall health of the economy, UH income growth rate, which is, you know,

how the average Americans wealth grows, UM, I think, changes to unemployment, and the growth of the hourly wage. And they found that the correlation was basically statistically non existent. That when you lower tax rates or raise tax rates, but specifically in this case, when you lower the highest tax rate, it does nothing to improve the GDP, to improve hourly wages, to improve median wealth. Um. Just just statistically speaking, over the course of the two lowering the

tax rates did nothing for those things. Yeah, So speaking from that, and you can say, well, it doesn't really do anything. Yeah. Well, with with Reaganomics, I think, well again, I say, most people agree, but no one agrees. Uh, it did help inflation, if he was it was because of his policies, but tax revenues didn't seem much change at all under those policies. Uh. We're not even getting into, you know, the part of Reaganomics where he kind of shut down trade with a lot of countries, keep it

in house and the effect that had. And I I've gotten varying answers on how long after presidency can you even look back and with a good judgment um of like the policies really take effect ten years later when you're gonna see or no, it's more like twenty years or no, you can see it immediately with short term fixes. So it's the whole thing is very frustrating because no

one agrees. Everyone thinks they're right. Yeah, that's the frustrating part is everybody thinks they're right, like Obama's policies are almost virtually the exact opposite of Reagan's. Well, that's funny you say that, because that's not necessarily true. He well, he in that he kept the Bush era tax cuts going. He's actually kept lower um tax rates than Reagan did. And Reagan's always pegged with the trickle down economic theory, right,

Obama's got this other one going. It's called quantitative easing. So with Reagan it was trickled down tax policy. Under Obama it's trickled down monetary policy, and by pumping money into the markets through the FED, it's actually helping because of this income inequality. It's helping the wealthiest Americans by far, without anything trickling down really to the um, lower working middle class Americans. So trickle down policy doesn't necessarily just

mean tax policy. You can also mean monetary policy. And we've got a very specific trickle down policy being carried out under Obama's entire two terms so far through connoitative easing. Either way, there's a vast transfer of wealth going on right now, just as there was in the eighties. Yeah, i'd suggest people read up on their own if they

uh want to jump in this argument. This one kind of also once you really start looking into it, especially if you go beyond like what helps and really step back and look at what's being done and the effects of it forget you know, well, my idea is the best way to to cure recession Theoretically, Like if you if you just get out of that mindset and you look at economic policies and you look at them through the lens of income inequality, then suddenly conservative and liberal

and Democrat and Republican, I'll just kind of fade away, and basically everybody has reason to feel like they're being talked out of something very valuable. Yeah, I came up with the nine D. I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with it, Josh and Amis. I wonder if if you did cut down on the tax rates for the wealthy to to about where they are now. This this is like bargain basement tax rates. Frankly, it used to be at n in the sixties ninety was

the highest. Now it's thirty five ent under Reagan. Much of the world pays a lot more taxes than we do. Oh yeah, so thirty. I think it is fair for everybody. You to say the least if not unfair because it's so low, But let's say that it's fair. You keep the tax rates low on the wealthiest earners, and you let them build up as much money as they want in their lifetime. But when they die, you text their estate like there is no tomorrow. And I wonder, first

of all, you increase revenue, but you also prevent dynasties. Uh, you want to prevent dynasties. Sure. I read an article about how UM the those who inherit wealth tend to invest it less, they tend to hoard it more because they didn't have any means of accumulating wealth other than

a windfall. I think if you just look at it statistically speaking, and you look at rather than again on an individual basis, if you look overall, when wealth is inherited rather than earned, the inherited wealth is less often invested in ways like um that create new jobs then the wealth that's earned. And it's the same thing like if you won the lottery or something like that, you should be terrified of losing that money because you didn't

do anything to earn it. So there's no guarantee whatsoever that you will ever earn that money or have that money again once you spend it. If you amass a fortune in industry and lose it, you did it once, there's a likelihood that you could go do it again, so you're more likely to take more risks with that wealth. But people work to take care of their families for generations to come, like that's what their goal is, right.

So let's say you have a hundred million dollars state and you have one kid, and your state is tax at when you die, your kids still gets ten million dollars. If your kid inherited ten million dollars, you're a wealthy person and your kid inherits ten million dollars. I think you can get your eternal rest easy knowing that your kid's gonna be okay with the ten million bucks for the rest of his or her life. I think that's fair. That's enough to set them up in business for sure.

That's enough of a leg up that most people don't have. I uh, that's fine. You don't have to agree with me. Yeah, I think it's I think it's like when I hear about Bill Gates is only gonna leave his kids so much money or whoever was it Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or someone they both are they pledged like a significant amount of their their estates right to not to

get leave it just lead that to their children. I think that's that's great, But I think that's like it should be a person's choice and the government shouldn't make that decision for them. Like government making decisions like that just that makes my blood boil. But that's tax policy, man, Like they can make that decision while you're alive or when you die. It's still there your income being taxed

in either way. It's like are they taxing your inheritance before your death or well, But it isn't tax policy because josh An nomics isn't. No. But the very fact that there are taxes and then progressive means that the wealthiest people pay more. The more you learn, the more tax you pay. So why does it matter whether it's

now or when it's when you die? And I that's not an entirely that's kind of a globe interpretation because I realize what I'm saying is normal taxes now and then a heavy tax when you die to prevent dynasty's and to increase revenue. I just don't think it will disincentivize work, because I think while you're alive, you still want to make money. People's those the people who are dedicated to amassing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

That's not going to prevent them from making money while they're alive. It's not you don't think they're still alive and their kids still get a slice of the pie. But what about their kids kids and their kids kids, Well, then it's up to their kid to go out and through his own effort or her own effort, amass their own fortune just like everybody else's. Everybody gets to start at zero, although those rich kids still get that leg up of ten percent of the estate. That's that's just

my idea. I got your josh Anamics, Josh ms Man, We're and get some letters for that one. You got anything else? Uh? And hey, let me say that, like, I think people should be able to live much more meagerly than they do. I'm not a proponent of people leading these lavish, wasteful lifestyles, but I think if you know you've made your money in a legitimate way, then

that's your right to do so. I guess you know. Yeah, I wouldn't want some government putting their hand in my pocket and saying, hey, you worked really hard for all that, give me of it. Well, I mean, who does Nobody wants that, especially when you when you look at government wastefulness or if you don't want a fund war or something like that, like then it makes it even harder

to bite. Yeah, the whole thing makes me want to drop out and move to an island or someplace in the woods, very quiet, to where I don't have to even think about any of this stuff. I got my little garden and got my chickens and my goats. You need to go make some money so you can do that. Yeah, I want just a little nine bed room house on like the staff. Yeah, all right, are we done with this? We're done with trickle down economics. If you want to learn more about it, you can read this article on

how stuff works dot com. Just type trickle down economics into the search bar. And since I said search bar's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this one. The waiting is the hardest part. Hey, guys, just found your podcast a few months ago and I love it. Um. The reason I'm thanking you is because I have a bit of a worrying problem. I just sent out my application to dental school and now I'm playing the waiting game.

Through my waiting I always find myself worrying and wondering what could happen, even though I know it's not the best thing for me. Through my long days at work this summer, listening to you guys really helps me, uh not only take my mind off the process, but helps take the bite off my worrying mind and even makes me laugh out loud while people look at me like I'm on crack, which by the way, I know all about through your crack podcast. That was a good one, um.

So thanks for what you do. You're informative and your humorous podcast makes my day easier, helps me through the waiting game, and teaches me so much about what I do not know. By the way, I know it's a long shot, but if by any chance you read this on listener mail, please give a shout out to my fiance Elizabeth. We have less than a year before a

big day. And that is from Caleb Davis. Indicator I end is that Indiana yeses so Caleb, I was just making sure there wasn't some new state I didn't know about in Yes, um so Caleb and Elizabeth from Indo hoo, congratulations And Caleb, I hope you get into a dental school. My friend, Uh follow up with us? Does it? Caleb bright us frequently? Is that the Caleb I'm thinking of? No, that is not you're thinking to Caleb that won our contestant at lunch with us? Is that the same Caleb

that writes us sometimes follows us on Twitter? I think, so, oh hey, what's is? Well? We're gonna say slat. I don't remember well at any rate. Thanks to all that Caleb's out there who listen. We appreciate you. All right. If you're named Caleb, or even if you're not, and you want to get in touch of this, you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on our Facebook page. It's Facebook dot

com slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and join us at our home on the web, the Beautiful Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com