The answer I wish I had given…..
In a discussion of political merit the closing sentence was…”but trickle down hasn’t worked”…. The circumstances stopped the conversation, but here and now is my reply:
Every serious gardener knows that trickle is the most effective irrigation. Any watering from above is at best temporary, and much of the water is lost in runoff. But the water that comes gradually from a source in the soil itself, nourishes the plants deep down at the roots and long term.
When my father arrived in this country with the fifty-dollars he had deposited with the steamship company, no one greeted him with a thousand, or even hundred dollar hand-out. He had to get a job before he ran out of money. He worked as a janitor in a mental institution. He knew that “trickle” works. He trickled pennies into savings and eventually bought a business, took a family of five to visit his homeland in Europe and sent his son to college.
Trickle down does work but slowly. No immigrant generation of the last century expected to live like the railroad barons they worked for, but they were eating regularly, could by the necessary clothing and shoes and sent their children to universities and medical and law schools. Maids in the households of the wealthy gathered insights, ideas, standards which they applied to their own families later. My mother, for instance, forced to buy inexpensive clothes for me was very proud to buy for me the same shoes her former employers gave their children and so I thank her for the healthy feet that transport me seventy years later.
The quick fix is very rarely the best solution. Drops of water and pennies can and have born fruit in the wonderful environment of a free and safe United States of America.
