Sorry Ms. Trump Spokesperson.
America is not a bar. American public policy programs are not beer. And she never once tells us how much each reporter makes each year. The first misdirection in the allegory starts at the beginning with the assumption....Ten reporters...as if they are all making roughly the same money. This is even more important than we may initially think because...
Another misdirection is what taxes she is talking about. It is not like there are no other taxes out there besides the tax on the drink of beer. How much of the income of each reporter in her allegory goes to other taxes besides income taxes? The reporters each pay, for example, the same exact sales tax on every item they buy besides beer in the allegory, and there are state and local taxes to consider. And the richest reporter may be paying a higher income tax rate on the beer in the allegory, but what about the other income received from passive and active investments, which are subject to a much lower capital gains tax, so that more money remains in the richest reporter's pocket. And why should the richest reporters children get the benefit of no tax whatsoever when the richest reporter dies, which is not mentioned in the allegory.
The sense of unfairness about our tax system is rarely explained to the American people in corporate media to begin with. We are never told that when we add up all the different taxes, we find a relatively flat tax already exists for about 80% of income makers (look at far right column chart in link to show percentage of income paid in all taxes, which is around 30%) since the dawn of Mr. 666's reign (Ronald Wilson Reagan, count the letters in each of his names). And rich people are making a killing these past nearly 40 years and have much less tax to pay overall than they did in the previous nearly 40 years. And the income growth for the middle and lower sectors has been abysmal. So no trickle down, even as automation from computers and other technologies have made each worker's productivity go up rather dramatically--and most of those workers do not share in that productivity the way they did in the days of unions.
This allegory is pernicious and is designed to appeal to those most ignorant of how the overall tax system functions, and belittles the foundation of governance and policy. Again, what the government largely spends money on is based upon public policy, not beer. It may be dumb spending in some areas, but the biggest dumb area we should look at is the cost of the Empire, which does not buy much for regular Americans at this point at least.
For fun, here is a more enlightening allegory about three people and twenty cookies. It is enlightening because it is very clear about the level of wealth or income owned by each of the three people. It is also subject to similar criticism as I did above, but at least it has the salutary effect of talking about unequal wealth that is at an outrageous level compared to where we were when supposedly America was "great."
