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Going with the Flow

Cash rains down on rich people from a golden 'Tax cuts' fountain. Behind a bollard, a mother says to her child, 'Now we just wait for it to trickle down.'

There was much talk of tax cuts for high-income earners in the 2020 Budget. Here a mother and son wait for the ‘money fountain’ to reach them — a reference to the controversial trickle-down economic theory which assumes that tax reductions for the rich will eventually benefit everyone else. During the Great Depression, the American folk humorist Will Rogers observed that rather than money trickling down, like water, to the needy in fact it ‘trickled up’.