system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
REAGANOMICS. Like I'm five, I wasn't even a fetus when that happened.
gpt
Reaganomics is also known as supply-side economics (and got its nickname because of its association with Ronald Reagan).

The idea is that supposedly, if you give more money to the rich (and to big companies), that that money will "trickle down" to the lower parts of the economy.

The notion is that if you give a rich man a bunch of money... maybe he'll buy a car (for example). And then the car salesman (and the people who made the car) will have money... so maybe they'll remodel their houses. And so all the people who worked on *that* will have money... so maybe they'll go out to eat for dinner. So the cooks and waitresses will have money. So by giving money to a rich man, you've given money to everyone he spent that money on, and everyone *those* people spent money on, and everyone **those** people spent money on, and so on.

There are arguments *against* this, however.

Firstly, is the rich man going to spend his extra money? Well... not necessarily. A rich man is far more likely to put his money into his bank account to collect interest. It'll be a number in an account somewhere. It's not like he needs to spend it - he's rich, he's got everything he needs already. The poor man, on the other hand, would almost certainly spend it - if not on necessities, than on luxuries he wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to get.

Secondly, if the rich man spends that money, what will he spend it on? He's much more likely than a poor man to spend it on something imported from another country, be it a car, a wine, or a factory full of children willing to work for 12 cents an hour. In which case, that money isn't even staying here, it's getting shipped off somewhere else. Or, maybe the rich man will take a foreign vacation and cut out the middle-man.

Thirdly, while the argument goes that the money the rich man spends will pump through the veins of the system and the added supply of resources (and demand that its spending causes) will create jobs... but this causal effect is highly dubious. If a dozen people eat at a fancy restaurant for a night, spending hundreds of dollars they wouldn't otherwise spend, does that really mean the restaurant will hire a new employee to compensate for the increased traffic? Or... will they just be happy at having had a good day and just go on like normal? If 100 more Ford cars are sold in America than would have otherwise, will the factory hire more employees?

Finally, the poor man has a far more immediate need for the money than the rich man. He needs to worry about paying the bills, buying the groceries, and making ends meet. The rich man already has that stuff covered, so for him it's just a bonus, an excess.

TL;DR - Reaganomics says that if you pay a rich man, the money will move through the economy when he buys something, and the person who gets that money buys something, and so on. The argument against that reasoning is that if you give that money to a poor man, they're more likely to spend it immediately, more likely to spend it *locally*, and more likely to be in *need* of it in the first place.