I read Phil Pinkham’s letter of Oct. 12 with some interest. In it he alleges that politicians are attempting to take money from people via taxes, spend it to create jobs, which will then result in more tax revenues to create more jobs. He compares this to a perpetual motion machine, which has been shown to be not possible.

A much more useful comparison would be to compare trickledown economics with such a machine. That is the theory in which our government gives tax breaks to the super-rich, who will either spend it or otherwise use the extra wealth to create jobs.

The problems are:

* Those who are very well off already have enough money to buy anything that they want.

* No business person would stay in business long while providing a product or service that few had the money to buy; or if they hired workers with nothing for them to do.

If business people are unable to create jobs then perhaps government should step in. There is certainly plenty of useful infrastructure work to be done, not to mention our schools and research to develop clean energy, just to name a few.

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By adding some government money (aka energy) into the system, we then turn the perpetual trickledown machine into one that has two advantages:

* Money is put into the pockets of those who most need it and will spend it.

* Useful work gets done. I’ll name this trickleup economics.

Bill Williamson

Jefferson


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