New York Times discovers that Reaganomics works!

...sort of.

Conservatives have always done a poor job of framing a lot of our best arguments on the battlefield of public debate. Of course it certainly hasn't helped that we've had to filter those arguments through a mostly hostile media, but as Rumsfeld once said, you go to war with the Army you have, not the one you wish you had.

So before I get into the latest silliness from the NYT, let's take a minute to define Reaganomics, first. Ronald Reagan believed that if you reduce taxes and put more money back into the hands of the businesses and people who create/earn it in the first place, that this additional capital will become an engine of job creation.

As an example, let's say taxes are cut in such a way that an Insanely Rich Guy winds up with an extra ten million dollars in his pocket, and that he decides that he's going to use that ten million dollars to purchase a super yacht for cruising the Carribean.

Well someone has to build the yacht, someone has to make the materials that the yacht builder will use to build the yacht, someone has to broker the deal for the yacht to be sold, someone has to deliver the yacht to the buyer, and someone has to lease slip space so that Insanely Rich Guy has somewhere to park his yacht. By contrast, if the government had simply taken that ten million dollars instead, that money would have disappeared into the miasma of government waste. By letting Insanely Rich Guy keep the money, we have allowed him to start a project (the building of a super yacht) that could wind up employing a hell of a lot of people.

That's the essence of Reaganomics.

The Left, though, are not fans of this transaction. There is something unseemly about Insanely Rich Guy blowing a couple million on a luxury yacht he doesn't really need, no matter how many jobs he creates. And so they came up with a nasty little name that they use to denigrate the theory. They call it "Trickle Down Economics."

So, here we are in the middle of a nasty recession, and along comes the New York Times to take another little swipe at Reagan with a piece cleverly titled "Trickledown Downsizing." See, apparently, all the bad economic news means that those who service the rich are losing their jobs because the rich are cutting those service gigs first as they look to cut back on expenses to weather the downturn.

Here's the gist of the piece...

"IN September, Cathy DeVore, a real estate agent in Larchmont, N.Y., whose business has been at a standstill lately, began taking gradual steps to lay off her longtime nanny and housekeeper. Aware that the woman supports a son, a mother, and a niece in Dominica, and worried for their well-being, Mrs. DeVore wanted to make sure her employee found another source of income before losing her $500-a-week salary."

Here's the problem the Times creates for itself with this piece. The reason why they call it "Trickle Down" is because they don't believe that the jobs that are created by the wealthy pay a fair wage relative to how much the wealthy get to keep in the first place. See it's not fair to let Insanely Rich Guy keep ten million bucks, if the jobs he creates with that ten million bucks only pay 30 Grand.

But if it's a bad thing that this housekeeper is about to lose her job, then it follows that the job she's about to lose must be a worthwhile job, right?

And if this is an example of "Trickle Down Economics" costing this woman a good job, then it also follows that the reverse must be true. Jobs like this housekeeping gig are, by definition, made possible by a humming economy where the wealthy are spending profligately.

Put another way, when the rich have more money, people like Ms. DeVore's housekeeper get good jobs. There is simply no way to argue that downsizing can trickle down without ceding the point that prosperity trickles down as well.

But don't take my word for it. Dig deeper into the article and the New York Times makes the same exact point.

"In the New York area, where there is a high number of dual-career professionals and where workdays are notoriously long, the number of people filling in for them at home is also immense. Domestic Workers United, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates there are more than 200,000 nannies, housekeepers, personal chefs and other domestic workers employed in the New York metropolitan area.

And as professionals recalibrate their spending because of job losses, salary or bonus cuts or just anxiety about the future, said Ai-jen Poo, an organizer at Domestic Workers United, “domestic workers’ wages are often the first thing that gets compromised.”

“Essentially, 10,000 jobs lost at Lehman Brothers means 10,000 domestic workers’ jobs that are in jeopardy,”."

So by the New York Times' own argument (made by way of Ai-Jen Poo), if people lose good jobs when the wealthy have less money to spend, then they also FIND good jobs when the wealthy are flush with cash.

Therefore, it follows logically, that if we want more Americans to find and keep good jobs, then we need to make sure that the rich have more money to spend....

The best way to make sure that Ms. Devore's suffering does not trickle down to her housekeeper is to cut Ms. Devore's taxes to make up for the loss of income her company is experiencing.

Right?

What am I missing here?