El Trickle Down Sí Llegó

$4.99 for green onions

$4.99 for green onions.

I stood there, stunned in the produce aisle, running the pseudo-accounting I run in stores now. Cebollines. The green part you throw on top at the end so the scrambled eggs look like somebody cared. I care, so yeah, $4.99, and the tomatoes and the garlic and the yellow onion I was actually going to cook with came to less than that, the three of them together. The decoration cost more than the food? What the fucking fuck. I didn’t purchase them, by the way. Not this time, Publix!

I know what you are going to tell me, I know the counters, at least some of them. Supply chains, drought somewhere I’ve never been, fuel, labor, taxes, tariffs here, wars, and cost-of-labor that, a store deciding what a neighborhood will pay, the market self-regulates itself, $4.99 is for a reason, yada-yada. Some of it is true, granted, but I’m not writing about onions or onion prices either.

The story they sold us

The people who sold us our ideas about money, around money, who has it, how it should be used, who should use it and when, had solid arguments, mostly.

The idea or ideas, mostly that money sitting in a vault does nothing but money in the hands of somebody who builds, the entrepreneurs, the private champs of our capitalist society, should mostly get a plant built. And then the plant needs people, so the people get paid, then the people spend their money, and whatever they spend it on has to get made by somebody else who also gets paid, and everybody makes and spends money, it trickles down everywhere and we are all happy and sing Kumbaya. So naturally, rich people, they are the ones that generate the jobs and then all the money and the wealth, for everybody around them, so they need the money the most. And you let the builders keep more of what they make, and the building spreads it around on its own. This idea, not a charity but the plumbing where wealth and goods and value trickle down along the plumbing, sounds really nice but alas, here I am having an existential crisis over $4.99 green onions and I’m sure you’ve had similar crises over similarly priced items recently.

I’ve watched people I respect hold those capitalistic ideas, talk about them, rationalize the thing, and there are stretches where even I look at it and it seems to be doing what it says, no? Some years ago things appeared to be going well for most of us in this economy. IIRC, green onions were .79 a piece.

But yeah, almost forty-something years of it now and the thing everybody says, left, right, doesn’t really matter. And ultimately not nothing came down, and the money stayed up there. The 1 percenters and 2 percenters are as rich as ever.

The money moved up

I’m not making this stuff up. The Federal Reserve has published who owns what in this country every quarter since 1989. First quarter of 2026, the top 1% holds 31.6% of all household wealth. The top 10% holds just under 68%. The bottom half of all American households holds 2.5%. Two point five percent. Half the country, split between them, 1/40th of the thing (Fed, Distributional Financial Accounts, Q1 2026). By the longer-run estimates the top 1% was somewhere near 23% in the late 70s, and I’d check that number before I bet money on it, but the direction is not in dispute by anybody.

Now take the part that was supposed to be the whole deal: between 1978 and 2024, net productivity went up 80.5%. This net productivity means that we got better at making all the things. So the workers are clearly doing their part but still typical worker pay across those same 46 years went up 26% while CEO pay went up 1,094% (EPI, 2024). Do that division and the guy at the top got about 42 times the raise you did, out of the same work, or arguably less.

And today, right now, 977 American billionaires are sitting on $9.24 trillion, up $2.2 trillion in the last twelve months alone (Americans for Tax Fairness, June 2026). The ten richest men in the country are up 526 percent since March of 2020 after you adjust for inflation, roughly six-fold (Oxfam, 2025). And in June one of them crossed a trillion dollars, the first person in history who ever did, and then dropped back under it twelve days later when the stock came down, about $270 billion gone (Forbes and Americans for Tax Fairness, June 2026). Six years since March of 2020. Mia’s tiny whole life, for perspective.

So the money moved, and it moved up. Cuando dicen que la marea sube todos los botes, pregúntate cuáles botes por favor.

And yeah, somebody is going to tell me the money does come down, through wages, through spending, through a hundred ordinary places, and they’re right, I’m not saying zero. I’m saying rate. 26% in 46 years is not zero. It’s just not what 1,094% looks like, and it’s not what a pipe looks like either, and please, look how much we the middle class suffer, I can’t imagine being dirt poor. I’ve heard, “being poor in this country is very expensive”, oh, how I can imagine that.

The pipe trickled down and ran perfectly. On time, at pressure, every day, to every floor, for the last whatever years. The thing carried money some places but for most, it just wasn’t carrying money.

What actually came down

El trickle down llegó, pero no en dinero y riquezas. Llegó en un trickle down a modo de crisis de valores y de integridad, y de corrupción. Los valores viven por dentro y nadie los puede ver, así que lo único que se ve, y lo único que se puede parar, es la conducta.

What came down was how people treat people as consumers and humanity is a second-thought. What trickled down are the numbers, the need and the architecture to sell to and extract. Conduct is what you do when you have a little bit of power over somebody else, whether you squeeze the person under you or you don’t, whether you hand the cost down or you eat it yourself. Not the version you’d tell at dinner, the thing you actually did, that’s the conduct.

Just watch how capitalistic interests historically deal with and treat somebody smaller than them. These interests take as much as they can and give back the least they can get away with, and they do it on purpose. We all feel in our bones something is off with the way things are going, we all know these capitalistic interests are stealing and extracting from us. The thing that came down the pipe is bullshit. It’s extraction, it’s a lack of compassion, it’s suffering, and we’ve normalized it. Some people even call this progress, or a free-market. It’s bonkers!

Then the guy who runs a shop of forty people does it to his forty. And the guy with three employees does it to his three. And then you are at somebody’s dinner table and a father is doing it to his kid, probably keeping score, holding the ledger, and he learned it from his boss, who learned it from his, all the way up to somebody in a building nobody in this story has ever been inside. And we exploit each other and corrupt each other because that’s what actually trickles down, the conduct, the exploits, the suffering which creates fear and more need, and greediness, and you can’t call me crazy, some years ago we even had slaves up in this mother, and today we can argue all day that slavery is still pervasive across our justice and penal systems, which is just another way of exploiting and extracting wealth…

Some of that is not even learned, it’s arithmetic. His margins got squeezed by the same arrangement and the only lever he has is the forty. But the rest of it, the part that isn’t arithmetic, is that having somebody below you is the only proof most of us ever get that we are not at the bottom.

Cipayos

Albizu had a word for the ones who did the exploitation to their own. In Lares, Puerto Rico, on September 23, 1950, in a speech, he called them cipayos, the sepoys, the native troops the empire points at their own people, and then he went further than that. Los negreros de su patria dedicaos a la cacería de sus hijos. The slavers of their own homeland, out hunting their own children. He was talking about the men who ran the colony for the yanquis and called it democracy. They were not greedy men particularly. They had picked which people they belonged to.

This stuff stopped being a scandal a long time ago too. Now it’s so normalized as just how you do business, and somebody will teach it to a 22-year-old on his first job so he doesn’t get eaten. I remember the first older businessman I ever did business with. “Sue me,” he told me, as a way to settle some money he owed me and my partner at that time. We were having tacos. This is just natural, it’s American, we’ll settle and you’ll get something.

You see that cowboy-ism and much more trickle down at every table.

Normalized at every table

Rich Dad Poor Dad, everybody has it, I have it, it has something like 40 million copies sold, it’s the money book, the one your tío hands you when you turn 22. Not mine. Mine never gave me anything in my entire life, not even his time, guess he’s as greedy as you can be (hah!). Anyway, I read it and I underlined it and I passed it to somebody else. First chapter. Rich dad’s whole teaching method is that he hires two 9-year-olds at 10 cents an hour, and then he stops paying them at all and works them for free, and the free part is on purpose, the free part is the lesson. Fear makes you take the job, desire makes you spend the check, and those two run you in a circle for 50 years, and you are broke because you let your emotions do your thinking for you.

And he is not wrong about the fear. The fear is real, you can watch it run people, it ran me. He gets the fear right and then tells you it started inside you.

The best-selling money book in the world, bought mostly by people who are not rich, and what it tells them is that the reason they are not rich is inside them. Nobody had to enforce that one. And rich dad himself, nobody has ever verified the man existed. Kiyosaki’s company Rich Global LLC went into bankruptcy in 2012 owing about $24 million on a judgment, around $26 million in liabilities against $1.8 million in assets. The guy teaching you to master money, no?

I mentioned the extremes of slavery a while back, but in different scales it looks much closer to home, familiar. The contract that goes to somebody’s friend, with the paperwork done clean enough that it isn’t technically anything. The landlord who raises it because the market says he can and who will tell you, sincerely, and he means it, that it isn’t personal. The boss who scopes work he will not price, he wants the thing built and he wants the cost to show up in a budget that isn’t his. The guy who moves a deadline Thursday at 4pm because moving it costs him nothing and costs you your Saturday, and then says thanks, appreciate you, and he means that too. The vendor. The adjuster. The HR lady reading you a policy she did not write and does not like. The corporate lawyer, the mediator, fighting for the corporation and stepping on the individual, legally. The restaurant owner who keeps lowering the quality of the food items, in the name of profit. The wages unreported, the stolen tips, all the same at a different scale.

None of them thinks he’s corrupt or corrupt-adjacent or doing anything wrong, in any of these situations. This is just what is. Así son las cosas en el capitalismo, the survival of the fittest. None of them notices what really trickled down. Cada uno de ellos se acuesta tranquilo. Each of them, each of us, is just doing our job. I’m just doing my job. He’s just doing his job. She’s just doing her job. We are all doing our jobs… that’s what trickles down man, the lack of responsibility, the hyperindividualism aggravated by a general lack of integrity smells like an infantilized society, a topic for a different essay.

The only exit

La muerte es el único descanso del que vive bajo el yugo de la avaricia y la corrupción.

I wrote that in my journal and I’m not going to clean it up for you. It isn’t a wish. It’s what it feels like to carry this frustration for a long time and then look up and the arrangement is still the arrangement, and sometimes it feels worse and things feel tighter and exhaustion talks like that sometimes and it should be allowed to.

And that’s the deal our work culture is actually offering, no? The number keeps moving, retirement keeps moving, and the only exit anybody is guaranteed is dying. It’s demoralizing in a way I don’t have good words for. So of course we dream about becoming 1 percenters and 2 percenters, with all our hearts, or with all our greed, and I can’t tell anymore which one of those it is in me.

Be the floor

I don’t have a policy for you. I’m not going to propose a tax structure, I don’t have the standing and I’d be performing if I tried.

What I have is the only valve I’ve found, and I’ve been chewing on it maybe six years, so take that for whatever it’s worth. Somebody has to be the floor. Not the floor you walk on, the floor like a wage floor, the number nobody is allowed to go under. Something rolls downhill at you and you take it and you do not hand it to the person below you, and it stops there, on you. The one who prices the work out loud, the one who tells you what it costs before he eats it, the one who says no on a Thursday, the one who talks to the guy at the register like a person when nothing in the arrangement requires it, when there’s no upside, when nobody’s watching, when it doesn’t show up on any chart anywhere, and that job is for all of us.

Solo necesitamos cuidarnos el uno al otro, tener relaciones, amistades, amarnos. La integridad, aplicada, operacionalizada, vivida, no hablada.