System File
Supply-Side Economics
Promised trickle-down. Wallet test failed.
The System Files · One Page Per Rival · No. 06
The Record: 1981 — Present- What it promised
- Cut taxes at the top — on high incomes, capital, and corporations — and the gains flow downward: investment, jobs, and rising wages for everyone. Growth so strong the cuts pay for themselves. "A rising tide lifts all boats."
- What it ran on
- Accumulation at the top, trusted to transmit downward. The fuel was the same as capitalism's — capital — but concentrated harder, on the theory that concentration is where investment comes from.
- What it demanded of the worker
- Patience. The gains arrive at the top first, by design; the worker's share arrives later, through the transmission. The worker's job was to wait for the trickle.
- What the wallet got
- The waiting is now five decades old and documented. The top's share of income and wealth rose to records; the CEO-to-worker ratio went from roughly 21:1 to roughly 285:1; median wages stagnated against productivity; and the transmission mechanism — the trickle itself — is the single most studied failure in modern economic policy. The tide rose. The boats did not.
- Where it was honest
- Incentives are real, and marginal rates do change behavior — the insight wasn't fake, it was oversold. And it correctly identified that punishing success is a dead end, a principle Affordism keeps: our ceiling is unbounded. The difference is that we bolt the floor to it.
- The verdict
- Scored 5.5 of 24 on the eight tests — documented, not projected. Its own defining metric, the worker's wallet, is where it failed most completely: 0.5 on Material Wellbeing, the lowest wallet score of any implemented system except financialized capitalism. It asked the worker to wait, and the wait never ended.
Exhibit A — Their own best case, in their own words
Now read ours: one ratio, and what follows from it
THE SOFTPAPER · TWENTY MINUTES · AFFORDISM.COM →
Don't take our word for any of this. Read the system's own canon and its own advocates: George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (1981), the intellectual bestseller of the movement; Arthur Laffer's curve and its defenders at the Laffer Center; and the Reagan-era policy record in the primary sources. If their case reads stronger to you than the fifty-year wallet record, follow it. We link our rivals' best material on purpose — a system confident in its comparison doesn't hide the competition.