What is a trickle and how does it flow?

When is the modern world going to learn that wealth doesn't roll down hill? Okay I know, coins are round (a lot of them are. Some are frilly like the 20¢ and 2 dollar pieces in Hong Kong and they don't roll anywhere). But notes definitely don't roll down to us at the bottom of the hill. And get with it, economists: the analogy doesn't work.

Trickle-down economics is dead. Not dead like the TV remote or my phone when I forget to charge it and all that's needed are new batteries or the right charger cable. Properly dead, no heartbeat, no brainwaves. Unfortunately, like other things that are dead, the idea of it lives on.

The idea of the trickle-down principle in capitalism is that rich and powerful individuals, families, and companies should be free to make as much money as they please, because if money is whirling like a hot spa at the top, inevitably it will splash over the sides and dribble down to everyone else, through the naturally-functioning processes of the free-market economy. Jobs will be created to produce, process, and sell the gold taps, bubble bath, and champagne flutes which accessorise the hot-tubs of the rich, generating incomes and cash flows for every level from top to bottom.

Nice. But, sadly, it's just not true. What actually happens is that money concentrates at the top. Rich people don't get rich by spending lots of money - they get and stay rich by NOT spending, and by getting other people to pay (just ask Joseph Stiglitz who pays his first class flights to his money-spinning speaking engagements. Clue: it's not Joseph Stiglitz). Wealth flows uphill too, from us down below, to them up there, every time we pay rent to a landlord, or monthly fees to a mobile phone company, or tuition fees to a university, or interest to a bank because we can't get by every month without getting deeper and deeper into debt.  

But like the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus, the fantasy of trickle-down economics lives on, even though in reality it is lying in the gutter, stone dead, and smelling really quite bad.

No heartbeat, no brainwaves. Just like modern economics.