Cuba banking on 'trickle down' economics

I just think this is too funny considering the Cuba / America relationship and all the outright venom that term "trickle down" gets from people.

For Nandes, the booming business of tourism in Cuba is a sign of good things to come for everyone.

"You know I'm going to tell you one thing. We live off tourism. If there's no tourism, there's no life," he says. "Just look at the grocery stores here: They're empty because people have gone to other provinces."

He says the money generated by tourism will trickle back down: People working at the resorts will take his horse cart to get around town, he says.

NPR

Cuba is building a bunch of resorts to attract tourists and Raul seems convinced that the US embargo is on its way out so the big plan to revitalize the Cuban economy is to attract a bunch of relatively wealthy folks from away to vacation on the island and leave their money to 'trickle down' since not everyone can get a job at one of these resorts.

Travel writer says there is speculation that 1 million new American tourists would flood the country in the first year following the end of the embargo, and 2 to 3 million annually after that.

" "Cuba banking on 'trickle down' economics" "

"Have you been to Haiti?

That's what Cuba used to look like.

A few people were rich, and everyone else was starving."

Then the Castro Communists took over, and there's only a few more rich people.

The idea behind trickle-down economics is actually that if we lower the taxes on the very wealthy, they will reinvest in new business and thereby create more jobs. It's been the cornerstone of neocon economic policy since Laffer drew that fateful curve (actually taken from 14th century, Arab historian and economist, Ibn Khaldun) on a napkin for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 1974. This of course became known as Reaganomics.

It's really just another justification for redistributing wealth from the bottom to the very top (but trust us! it'll trickle back down!).

Actually, despite how Democrats act publicly, they're not far off either — having nothing approaching a viable economic platform of their own.

This story has absolutely nothing to do with supply-side economics/trickle-down economics/Reaganomics and everything to do a desire to restore Cuba's tourism industry. Consider that in another Caribbean island country, Jamaica, one quarter of all jobs are in tourism.

I first heard that term when Gordon Brown, labour prime minister, addressed the house of commons. That was back when he first promoted and proposed bailing out the banks.

I noticed the term because it did not make sense to me. Yet all those politicians were all for it.

We need a trickle up economic plan.