Obama’s brilliant speech on trickle down economics becomes exponentially more incredible with animation

I have something for you to watch while I’m working on tonight’s post. It’s a short animated piece put together by a fellow named Lucas Gray, who, among other things, works on The Simpsons. I don’t know if he was hired to do it, or if he just decided to pull together some friends and do it himself, but it’s absolutely amazing.

The accompanying audio was recorded April 03, 2012, when the President addressed an Associated Press luncheon. You can find a complete recording of Obama’s speech online, but here’s a clip from the transcript, for those of you who, despite my pleas, won’t watch the video.

…In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class. That’s how a generation who went to college on the G.I. Bill, including my grandfather, helped build the most prosperous economy the world has ever known. That’s why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made. That’s why research has shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.

And yet, for much of the last century, we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics. They keep telling us that if we’d convert more of our investments in education and research and health care into tax cuts — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. They keep telling us that if we’d just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we’d all be better off. We’re told that when the wealthy become even wealthier, and corporations are allowed to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary, it’s good for America, and that their success will automatically translate into more jobs and prosperity for everybody else. That’s the theory.

Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach — on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see. At the beginning of the last decade, the wealthiest Americans received a huge tax cut in 2001 and another huge tax cut in 2003. We were promised that these tax cuts would lead to faster job growth. They did not. The wealthy got wealthier — we would expect that. The income of the top 1 percent has grown by more than 275 percent over the last few decades, to an average of $1.3 million a year. But prosperity sure didn’t trickle down.

Instead, during the last decade, we had the slowest job growth in half a century. And the typical American family actually saw their incomes fall by about 6 percent, even as the economy was growing.

It was a period when insurance companies and mortgage lenders and financial institutions didn’t have to abide by strong enough regulations, or they found their ways around them. And what was the result? Profits for many of these companies soared. But so did people’s health insurance premiums. Patients were routinely denied care, often when they needed it most. Families were enticed, and sometimes just plain tricked, into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Huge, reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And our entire financial system was nearly destroyed.

So we tried this theory out. And you would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics, after the results were made painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory might show some humility, might moderate their views a bit. You’d think they’d say, you know what, maybe some rules and regulations are necessary to protect the economy and prevent people from being taken advantage of by insurance companies or credit card companies or mortgage lenders. Maybe, just maybe, at a time of growing debt and widening inequality, we should hold off on giving the wealthiest Americans another round of big tax cuts. Maybe when we know that most of today’s middle-class jobs require more than a high school degree, we shouldn’t gut education, or lay off thousands of teachers, or raise interest rates on college loans, or take away people’s financial aid.

But that’s exactly the opposite of what they’ve done. Instead of moderating their views even slightly, the Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal…

Of course, it begs the question why Obama, knowing all of this, supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but I’ll leave that for another time… when I’m not so giddy with Obama love.

Oh, and if you finish watching that, and you’re still looking for something to do, you can catch highlights from the debate between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly here. (My favorite part is when O’Reilly explains the economics behind Fox News, saying, “You go in, and you’re a hater — radio, cable, in print, whatever, and you get paid… a LOT of money. And capitalism drives that. There are people, a lot of Americans, who want to hear hate. And they hear it.“)

[note: All of the facts referenced in the Obama animation on trickle down economics are sourced here.]