Other non-profit entities (such as private foundations) are required to spend a certain fraction of their money each year or pay taxes. Universities are exempted from that requirement.

from [0]: "Harvard targets an annual endowment payout rate of 5.0 to 5.5 percent of market value. The University's actual payout rate has fluctuated over the past 10 years, from a low of 4.2 percent in fiscal year 2006 to a high of 6.1 percent in fiscal year 2010."

[0] https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance/endowme...

[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundation...

I liked the older term they used to use for "trickle down". They used to call it "horse and sparrow" economics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Critici...

"Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: 'If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.'"

It feels more honest that way.

To have this discussion properly, we would need to talk about tax incidence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence)

It's a relatively well known fact that eg it doesn't really matter too much whether officially the employer or the employee is required to pay the employees income tax---the money comes out of the same pot.

Similar things happen for other taxes. Eg VAT in European countries seems to be paid for by the shops, but it wouldn't make a difference (apart from convenience in collection) if you'd levied it directly on the shoppers.

Any discussions about 'trickle-down economics' is incomplete without tax-incidence.

More importantly, it happened in a country which forced people off their land at gunpoint, into urban poverty, where they provided a huge supply of cheap, fungible, and utterly disposable factory labor.

But that would run counter to the neo-liberal narrative... After all, the rule of law serves to protect investments, not the peasant forced off his land.

Where was the rule of law to protect said peasants? Perhaps the rule of law isn't actually necessary for industrialization - as long as capital is protected, everything is all well and good. Unless you're a peasant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

Taxing consumption is regressive; as your wealth increases, the amount of dollars spent relative to your wealth continues to decrease.

You would force people to consume? There's diminishing returns to that. At some point there are fewer worthwhile things to spend on and you start creating an system of make-work with the attendant environmental destruction and resource exhaustion. Free markets are neutral on these questions, it's policy that distorts social preference away from conservation and towards unsustainable growth that exacerbate the situation we're in now.

Money in a savings account is money invested.

Thanks to fiat money there's no money sitting idle: if you stuff your paper bills under a mattress, the central bank is just gonna print more money (temporarily) to reach its eg inflation targets. (And if you take your money out from under your mattress, they will print less money for a while.)

The rich aren't stashing most of their money under a mattress. Gates, Bezos, etc are worth billions, but that wealth is almost all based off of the stock prices in the companies they own percentagess of.

Inflation does that. Cash in your mattress loses 2% a year. A wealth tax would presumably tax productive wealth as much as unproductive wealth.

> It's encouraging people to make their money be productive instead of stashing it under a mattress. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.

It is, because storing money under a mattress is equivalent of investing in money itself. As OP said too, it is like you lent your money to all the other investors in the economy (because you taking that money out of the economy reduces the prices of capital goods, which means they can now acquire it for cheaper). This results in wealth creation, which you benefit from when you take the money out from under the mattress.

This of course, can only work as an active investment strategy if you have a fixed or predictable money supply. For an inflationary currency such as any fiat currency, you will just get screwed.

This works great for cryptocurrencies for instance, people keep talking about how nobody has any incentive to invest in Bitcoin projects if just holding it will make it go up. Well, when bitcoin holders hold bitcoin, bitcoin economy still grows, and the purchasing power of their bitcoin goes up.

You are right about monetary offset, if the central bank is well-run. (Which eg the Fed wasn't during the last recession.)

Of course, someone still has to decide whether to consume now or invest. Or whether to invest in economically efficient ways, or in ways that are only economically efficient because of weird tax arrangements (but are actually less productive).