Supply side economics destroyed our infra-structure .

[annabanana]

There are no ribbons to cut in the world of maintenance.

(It also castrated OUR regulatory agencies...)

Why does it still have so much damn currency.

[Initech]

1. And created lots and lots of untaxed wealth for the upper 1%.

[annabanana]

2. hollowed out our entire civic structure

and barely created enough jobs to keep the lights on..

[Sherman A1]

4. which answers the question posed in the OP

it's about money moving upward, that is about the sum of it.

[Gothmog]

3. Supply side economics have been a failure

[ProfessorGAC]

5. It Was Doomed From The Start

The whole "theory" is X therefore Y. Problem is, the macroeconomy does not operate in two dimensions.

It's too simplistic a concept to actually work anywhere but in an Econ class.

[HughBeaumont]

6. They sold the middle/working/poor a moldy bill of goods.

A rotted pile of Conservanomics debunked by the very salesmen that activated it.

The basic idea is that when taxes are too high, people refuse to engage in economic activity. If taxed activity drops too low, then there are fewer transactions to collect tax from. For supply siders, this mechanism constitutes the primary determinant of economic growth. They assume that lower taxes can actually increase government revenues in the long run, because the surplus income from an expanding economy is supposed to make up for the immediate effects of tax cuts.

Trickle-down theory was in fact an economic theory dredged up from the dustbin of history originally called "horse-and-sparrow theory." According to John Kenneth Galbraith, if you feed horses enough oats, it will pass through their digestive systems and their droppings will provide enough leftover oats to feed the sparrows. Translation: "Eat Shit" Economics.

Horse-and-sparrow was in practice during the 1890s, a decade that saw two banking crises. It made a comeback in the 1920s under Harding and Coolidge under the name "Mellonomics," named for cutthroat banker and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. As in the 1980s, Mellonomics created a massive wealth disparity, but far worse. Everyone now knows what the Harding/Coolidge policies ultimately resulted in.

The term "trickle down" was first coined by comedian Will Rogers in reference to Hoover giving out money to the wealthy, hoping it would somehow snake its way down to the poor.[5] John F Kennedy used the less wrong macroeconomic idiom that "a rising tide lifts all boats”.[6] Jesse Jackson shot back in the 1984 democratic national convention that "Rising tides don't lift all boats, particularly those stuck at the bottom. For the boats stuck at the bottom there's a misery index."

This makes the trickle-down theory something like the creationism of economics. Dress it up in the cheap tuxedo of Mellonomics, Reaganomics, and now "austerity" (much like creationism became "intelligent design&quot and it becomes a "revolutionary" new theory.

People still want to believe, because people still want to think they're better than everyone else.

[annabanana]

7. RICH people "want to believe"...

They are the only ones who can afford to.