Conservative economists are so embarrassing. You're almost 63 years old and you still believe in the invisible hand of the free market? Okay. Most of us outgrew imaginary friends before we hit the double digits, my dude.

"I'm gonna give tax breaks to big companies because they are job creators," says the hayseed of an economist.

The big company says, "Sure, kid." and pays the money out to its wealthy stakeholders, who have nothing to spend it on and pocket it.

"I helped!"

Anybody who espouses these theories who isn't a billionaire themselves is an absolute rube. A credulous, gullible, naive little babe-in-the-woods.

Here's some economic reality: if you can give a dollar to a billionaire or you can give it to a minimum wage worker, give it to the minimum wage worker every time.

The billionaire will still get it. Because the worker will spend it, generating economic activity.

Let's go sub-minimum wage. No wage. Give the dollar to someone who is broke. Destitute. Indigent. They'll spend it immediately, probably giving it to a business that employs minimum wage workers.

That's a dollar of business for that business. That business has taken in an extra dollar. It pays its workers in part with that dollar. The workers, making minimum wage and living paycheck to paycheck, immediately spend their wages. The dollar climbs higher up the ladder.

The dollar you gave the homeless person will keep being spent and keep climbing up the economic ladder until it comes to rest in fractions in the pockets of the wealthy investor class you wanted to give it to in the first place.

Along the way it has generated more than a single dollar's worth of GDP.

Now, you've got this keen theory that when it hits the pockets of the billionaires, they're going to invest it and it will become jobs.

Maybe you're right!

And maybe that dollar will, for the first time in recorded history, "trickle down" in any kind of meaningful fashion. It's bound to happen sooner or later, right? Right? It's got to work sooner or later!

But even if you're exactly right and the billionaire's going to do magical things with that dollar that's good for everyone, it still makes more sense to inject the money at the bottom of the economy than the top. Because it will still wind up at the top, but work all the way up.

The same people who talk about "trickle down economics" also say "a rising tide lifts all boats". But tides don't rise from above, my dudes. That's not a tide. That's rain. Rain doesn't lift boats.

Give economic relief to people who are living hand to mouth and they will immediately spend it, enriching themselves with whatever they spend it on. And the person or business they give the money to is enriched. And whoever they pass it on to is enriched.

This is so simple. How is it that so many economists who probably never played a single video game still think that money works the way it does in a Final Fantasy game, where if you spend it once it's just gone? Like it just evaporates?

Businesses don't create jobs.

Business creates jobs.

Businesses can't do business if they don't have customers. Customers can't do business if they don't have money. We've built a consumer economy and our great economists keep advocating we starve the consumer class.

The secret to keeping the engine of capitalism running for a million years would be: keep redistributing the money. Keep it circulating. When a dollar reaches the top kick it back to the bottom. Jeff Bezos still has his Amazon and whatnot but the money keeps moving.

There's this whole argument about whether wealth is earned or distributed but honestly it is created. That's the simple truth. The difference between wealth and mere resources is that wealth requires synergistic interactions to make the resources more than they are on their own.

And while there's certainly a tipping point where the returns vanish, allowing more interactions creates more wealth.

You don't want to literally have an ouroboros of money where billionaires keep emptying their wallets into the streets? Then just pay everybody enough money. Living wages, universal income, guaranteed jobs, however you want to do it. Put money back in circulation.

Top heavy capitalism will collapse under its own weight every time. Money has to circulate for the thing to work. And when it circulates, there's more wealth. Not just more money (that's inflation) but more wealth. More prosperity.

I know this is an old rant to people who have been following me, I go off on it every time I read a bad economic take.