Tim Ryan: ‘There Is Absolutely No Evidence that Supply Side Economics Works’

EXCERPT:

RYAN: "As I said, it’s a canard. It’s baseless. I was in Congress in 2003. President Bush said he was going to do the same thing. He was going to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the country and that was somehow going to trickle down to the communities that had been left behind by globalization. That decade had the slowest growth of any decade going all the way back to the Great Depression and it ended in an economic collapse in 2007, ‘08 and ‘09 that we are still in some ways digging our way out of. That economic theory is a joke. It just doesn’t work. There is absolutely no evidence that supply side economics works. You have to have investments back into the people of the country. What supply side economics has done is it’s not only concentrated wealth, but it’s concentrated opportunity. So people in many large swaths of the United States lack the opportunity to work their way out of their current economic situation or have more stability in the situation that they’re currently in. That’s the problem with this economic system. First and foremost, it doesn’t work, and the wealthiest people in the country — we don’t hate them because they’re wealthy, but we can’t afford to go to China and borrow $2.3 trillion to not reinvest back in the country but to give to the wealthiest people. This economic theory just doesn’t work."