Sunday, October 21, 2018

trickle-down economics: economía de goteo

trickle-down economics: economía de goteo = "quienes poseen el capital dejan caer gotas de su riqueza para beneficiar a los de abajo"

Duque, the newly elected right-wing president of Colombia, won in some part by repeating lies about trickle-down economics that he learned from US Republicans.  As argued by Luis Carlos Reyes in a recent NYT op-ed:

"... claimed that the Colombian government was bloated and that taxation levels were extremely high. Americans are used to hearing this canard when discussing their own tax system, and those who bother to look up the statistics know this to be false: Whereas average tax revenues in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries are around 34 percent of the gross domestic product, in the United States they hover around 26 percent. It is downright alarming, then, that the same claim could be successfully made in a country like Colombia, where tax revenues are a modest 20 percent of a much smaller GDP, well below O.E.C.D. and Latin American averages.
The president-elect Mr. Duque adopted the Republican rhetoric according to which “job creators” are treated unfairly, and he campaigned for tax reductions for these “creadores de empleo.” The fact of the matter, however, is that the rich receive preferential treatment, and even more so in Colombia than in the United States.

In 2010 — the latest year for which data in Colombia are available — the effective tax rate paid by the top 1 percent of income earners was 11.5 percent, a bargain compared with the 23 percent paid by the top 1 percent in the United States during that same year. ...."

Isis Giraldo here offers a more detailed analysis of how this retrograde ideology is being used to deepen inequality in Colombia, which regularly ranks in the top 5 or 10 most unequal countries in the world.