That dreadful concept called the "trickle down effect" just hasn't worked. Ask anyone who was middle class when Ronald Reagan first put it into practice in the 1980s. And then step back, out of range, because it is more than likely he has (perhaps irreversibly) slipped too far down the ladder from the middle-class to give you a civil reply. 

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith called it the "horse and sparrow theory". A theory described thus by an older and less elegant generation: "If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."

But this is not a recent squabble. William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic candidate for President of the USA around the turn of the 19^th century, said: There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

A fine idea for today's world. Make the poor rich and they will make the rich richer - by becoming more prolific consumers, which would lead to increased manufacturing, and a consequential boom in employment that would increase the number and spending of the new consumers, and thus repeat the cycle. It's a principle of wealth-distribution that's being championed today by Warren Buffet, the richest man in the world and one of its greatest philanthropists. 

Time to give Bryan's concept a whirl, methinks.