The farce of supply side trickledown economics…

Economists: the financial world’s very own illusionists.

They stride around in suits, waving graphs like magic wands, solemnly declaring what will happen to your mortgage rate because a butterfly sneezed in Beijing.

Except… they can’t actually predict anything.

Economists don’t forecast; they improvise. They stare at numbers until the numbers stare back, then announce — with total confidence — the opinion they already held. Politicians love this. Nothing impresses a minister more than someone who can use algebra to justify their prejudices.

And once in office?
They roll out the economic theory tailor-made for their ideology.
Right-wing? You get right-wing economics.
Left-wing? Left-wing economics.
Centre? A Choose-Your-Own-Disaster special.

But let’s talk about the great comic masterpiece of the field:
trickle-down economics — or as it should be known, trickle-on economics.

Invented by the Chicago School in the 1960s, refined by Milton Friedman, and embraced by Thatcher and Reagan, it promises that giving the rich more money will magically make everyone else better off. Like Santa, but with offshore accounts.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.
It has never worked.
It will never work.
But apart from that, flawless theory.

Instead of spending their tax cuts, the rich hoard the cash like dragons guarding gold. In Britain, they’ve stashed £570 billion offshore — enough money to fix everything except, apparently, their appetite for tax avoidance.

In America, it’s $4 trillion. They don’t hoard — they mega-hoard.

And then there’s Jeff Bezos, a man so wealthy he could buy every pub in Ireland and still have change to pay his workers properly. But no. Jeff treats money the way museums treat ancient manuscripts: look, but don’t touch.

Here’s the punchline: if he paid staff more, they’d spend it. And a lot of that spending would go straight back to Amazon. But trickle-down is an anti-joke: the wealthy keep their tax cuts, take money out of the economy, and congratulate themselves for “boosting growth”.

Northern Ireland dodged some of this nonsense by not having many stock-market giants. Elsewhere, “shareholder value” became a cult. ExxonMobil shrugged at US sanctions because shareholder value mattered more than geopolitics. Apple rakes in profits and still gets told it’s “disappointing.”

And now Rachel Reeves — an economist — is Chancellor.

If you hear gentle weeping, that’s the economy.
If you hear screaming, that’s me.