2024's Horse and Sparrow

With inflation being a huge talking point for the last few years, both serious contenders for the 2024 presidency have their ideas on what to do with an economy that's ever-slowly putting the working class in a vise.

Kamala Harris proposes raising the federal minimum wage, regulating price gouging, and taxing those who continue to profiteer off the post-pandemic climate.

Donald Trump wants to "drill, baby, drill," where energy prices will be lowered so much that the savings in production will be passed down to the consumer.

The problem with Harris' plan is that its complexity makes it difficult to show any tangible result.

The problem with Trump's is a hundred+ year old issue involving giving a leg up to the wealthy.

Decades ago, the government proposed tax cuts to the top earners, believing that the extra money would help stimulate the economy and help everyone else. It did the opposite. The people who received the tax cuts simply pocketed the excess.

This kind of policy has been tried for almost a century, and it has given us the same result. Critics have given this economic system a number of names: voodoo, trickle-down, and my favorite: horse-and sparrow.

Trump believes we are energy dependent right now (as of 2024, we aren't), and we need to be energy dominant (as of 2024, we are). He believes that by opening up more oil wells and increasing our energy output, electricity will be cheaper and our benevolent near-monopolies on energy production/distribution will pass the savings down to us.

I'm no clairvoyant, but based on history, this looks like giving all the oats to the wealthy with the hope that some of it left undigested for the rest of us -- if we're willing to pick through shit to get it.