Rick Perry and Mitt Romney
The two presidential aspirants during a recent debate Reuters

Rich people don't create jobs, that's what Paul Krugman says, and he's got the statistics to prove it. So does crooksandliars' Jon Perr in an epic take-down of trickle-down economics just last week.

The trickle-downers, like Romney and his fellow debaters (except for Ron Paul, at least) mostly favor the rich, who mostly get rid of jobs. Some call that efficiency, part of the creative-destructive virtuous cycle of capitalism. In a crony-free world, sure, but on the planet we actually live on, I call it either outsourcing to places with more exploitable workers, or vulture buyout capitalism. One of the most successful practitioners of this type of crony-capitalism was Mitts Romney, during his years at the notoriously successful Bain & Co. Just a small circle of friends...

In fact, rich people creating jobs, other than for each other, is about as likely as the proverbial camel getting through the eye of the needle. And trickle-down, as economic theory, is about as rational as that recent fatwa issued by a Muslim cleric, if it isn't indeed a hoax, just like trickle-down economics. I understand other Muslim clerics are now reviewing this new fatwa--that forbids devout women to handle cucumbers, carrots and other phallic-shaped foods. At least the fatwa would make some new jobs: The advice of the cleric is for the women to ask a male relative to chop up the phallic-shaped veggies first--that adds jobs right there.

The so-called trickle-down theory of giving money to the rich, too-big-to-fail, .1 percenters, so that those funds will trickle-down to the rest of us folks, has been tried since Reagan, that great B-list actor and A-list deficit-creating-President. He latched onto it as a great way to redistribute wealth upward to the elites.

That part worked just fine, as many have noted. It redistributed alright.

Never in the history of the U.S. has so much wealth been shifted from the Treasury and the pockets of the middle class to the ultra-rich--at least I think we have now actually surpassed the disparities of previous robber-baron and gilded-age excess. In the last three decades, as we all now know, while incomes for the 99.9 percent have been stagnant or decreased, the incomes and wealth of the upper .1 percent have soared.

Now, just to rub salt into the wound, we have two Republican candidates, who have both vowed to maintain this redistribution of wealth to the wealthy from the middle-class and the poor, Mitts Romney and Rich Perry, betting $10,000, over some squabble, during the latest GOP debate. At least Perry declined, I'll give him credit for that.

Just a token bet for Romney. He probably couldn't conceive of betting less. Doesn't that say it all? Do you make friendly bets of 10 grand with your friends? I was not amused.

I don't have $10,000 to squander like that. That's about what I pay for health insurance every year and it's going up 20% annually or thereabouts, too. Not because of Obamacare, thank you, but thanks to the private sector, who need to make as much as humanly possible off sickness and suffering--and that's while said insurance keeps covering less and the deductibles keep going up, too.

Funny that the bet is over Romneycare, which is pretty much a good deal for people in Massachusetts, but Mitts' backing away from it so fast it's probably rounding off the his heels of his Guccis so much that he needs a new pair every other day.

Wish I did have that extra money to burn. Maybe I should become a Republican luminary. They all seem to have plenty of dough to spread around. And to be safe, I could keep a stock of bananas handy, in memory of Bedtime for Bonzo's star, the original Federal-Budget-Buster-in-Chief (and this from an ultra-conservative think-tank), the late, great debtor Ronald Reagan.