This week, Donald Trump more or less revealed his tax plan, mostly dealing with adjectives rather than numbers. According to Trump, it’s called “a middle-class miracle,” probably by those thousands of Muslims who danced in the streets of a New Jersey city celebrating 9/11. I can’t imagine any other middle-class people cheering the elimination of a tax that doesn’t kick in until the taxable portion exceeds almost $11 million.

Trump said that the plan was bad for him, but, based on the sketchy details, it appears that it’s not bad for him, but rather Reaganomics 2.0, some more trickle-down economics, based on the idea that if  we just keep shoving money toward the upper 10% of our citizens, it will magically trickle down to the other 90% and make the entire country more prosperous.

George H.W. Bush called it voodoo economics. And he was being nice.

It’s strange that this idea is still around. It’s not as if it hasn’t been here before. It’s not as if the results are not well documented. And it’s not as if it did most people any good at all.

In the trickle-down concept, corporations and very rich people get the money, hire more people, invest in growing their business, pay their employees more and generally share the wealth. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.  In the real world, the richest get the money and keep it. That’s the reason that individual income among the workers stayed flat after the economy began to recover from the 2008 recession while corporations were making record profits.

That’s also the reason that the middle class dropped from about 60% of the population in 1980 to less than 50%  today while the percentage in the top tier has more than doubled.

But, as they say in the Ginsu knives commercial, “Wait, there’s more!”

Consider this:

From 1935 to 1980, approximately 70% of income growth went to the bottom (in terms of income) 90% of the population.

From 1981 to 2015 0% of income growth went to the bottom 90%. All of it went to the top 10%.[1]

In other words, before Reagan, abetted by Milton Friedman and Grover Norquist, decided that making the rich richer was the path to universal prosperity, the bulk of income growth went to people who spent it—on cars, homes, college educations for their children. This was known around the world as the American Dream.

That came to an abrupt halt with Reaganomics. Young Americans still went to college, but they left college deeply in debt. For the first time in memory parents didn’t believe that their children would be better off than they were. Employer/employee relationships—impacted by Friedman’s theory that the sole objective of business was to make money—were changed forever.

Although there seems to be no real evidence that secondary education in the United States was ever at the top of the ranks of industrialized nations, we did develop some interesting excuses. According to the Washington Post, one of the main criticisms leveled at the tests that measure education success is that “the United States has a higher poverty rate than most industrialized countries, and students in poverty tend to achieve less than their more affluent counterparts.”

So, we create more poverty.  

Between 2008 and 2012, corporate profits grew at an annualized rate of 20.1%. In the same period, disposable income grew by 1.4% per year.

And at the very top, it was even more unequal. In 1978, the ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation was about 30 to 1.  In 2014 it was about 300 to 1.

By the numbers, it appears that trickle-down economics works very well except for the trickle down part. The money is given to the rich. And they keep it.

And we shouldn’t forget trickle-down’s evil spawn: the concept that corporations are job creators. If the slow employment recovery after 2008 wasn’t enough to dispel that, the various strategies companies have used to pay their employees less should. Not only have companies shipped jobs off to countries where they pay employees a small fraction of what US workers are paid, they reduced the take-home pay for the workers they kept by cutting hours, reducing benefits, increasing the employees’ share of the benefits costs, or simply cutting salaries and wages.

I know from my own experience that, contrary to trickle-down theory, customers are job creators. When business requires that a company add employees to keep up with customer demand, they will. They will not add employees just because they have more money.

It should be obvious from past performance that cutting taxes and giving greater breaks to the top 10% is not the way to have a healthy economy. But in this age of greed, I’m not sure that those who are making the decisions are worried about a healthy economy. They are more concerned with next quarter’s bonus or—in the case of the politicians making the laws—donations from very rich people.

The poster child for this sort of thinking was an incident that happened when Henry Paulson was meeting with representatives of the big banks to discuss the billions of dollars the government was about to give them to keep them from sinking. These are the people who sliced and diced the mortgages and peddled them until the bubble burst. In some countries these would have been the people who would have fallen on their sword in shame.

According to one report, when Paulson stopped for questions, the first question, from the CEO of a major bank, was: “How will this affect my compensation?”

So much for big picture thinking.

Trickle-down theory is nothing new. There’s a great example of it in the Bible in Luke 16:19-31. A rich man, sometimes called Dives, has a rich man/poor man relationship with a beggar named Lazarus. Lazarus begs for crumbs from Dives’ table and Dives refuses. That’s the first part of the story.

The second part shows Lazarus in heaven. Dives has been sent to hell.

Sounds about right to me. Not because he was rich, but because he wanted it all.