Dwain Northey (Gen X)

 America—the great economic laboratory where we keep running the same failed experiment and acting shocked when the beakers explode. Let’s revisit that golden era from 1947 to 1979, when the bottom tier of Americans—the people who mop the floors, build the roads, teach the kids, and generally hold the entire country together with duct tape and grit—saw their incomes rise by a truly obscene 142%. How dare they? How dare regular people experience prosperity. That’s not what capitalism was designed for!

Enter the 1980s: the decade when hair got bigger, shoulder pads got wider, and economic policy got aggressively dumber.

This is when we resurrected the long-dead, long-discredited “trickle-down economics,” slapped a fresh coat of patriotic paint on it, and pretended it was innovative. Reagan didn’t invent a new theory—oh no, he just exhumed horse-and-sparrow economics, a pre–Great Depression gem that essentially claimed, “If you feed the horses enough oats, eventually the sparrows will get to eat what comes out the other end.” Yes. That was the actual, serious economic theory. Give the wealthy more food so the peasants can enjoy the byproduct. Hooray.

Reagan just dusted it off, ran it through the Xerox machine of his youth, and repackaged it as a bold vision for the future. Same manure, different marketing.

And since the 1980s? The top 1% has watched their income skyrocket almost 300%—a Mount Everest of wealth so high it needs supplemental oxygen. Meanwhile, everyone else is down at sea level, inhaling secondhand “prosperity” fumes and checking the sky for drips that never come.

But sure—keep believing it. Keep insisting that trickle-down economics is viable. Keep nodding like a bobblehead every time a politician tells you that if we just give billionaires ONE MORE TAX BREAK, the benefits will cascade down like the world’s saddest waterfall.

Never mind that the only thing trickling down for 40 years has been stagnant wages, higher costs, and economic anxiety so normalized we treat it like seasonal allergies.

Never mind that we literally proved from ’47–’79 that when you invest in the bottom, the entire economy surges upward. Too logical. Too effective. Too threatening to the narrative that the wealthy are magical prosperity unicorns whose glitter somehow creates jobs.

Instead, we cling to an economic theory that has the structural integrity of wet cardboard and the moral clarity of a used car warranty.

At this point, believing in trickle-down economics is like believing a casino slot machine is “due” because you’ve lost your paycheck, your rent money, and a kidney. Any day now, though, right? Just keep pulling the lever.

Meanwhile, the horses have never been more stuffed, and the sparrows? Well, they’re told to be grateful for the opportunity to hunt for crumbs in a pile of economic fertilizer that just keeps getting higher.