I'll take Trickle-down Economics for $1000, Alex. 

There are people who believe in the Easter Bunny too. They’re called children and we don’t put them in positions of power.

My parents just found out neither have a general family physician anymore. Apparently when you go to walk-in clinics a few times your GP can 'archive' you as no longer being their patient, which is what they did (it's conveniently a couple blocks away whereas the GP is further away). So now my Dad can't get his pre-op exams done except through long waits at a walk-in clinic or via emergency room physician because there is an extreme shortage of general practitioners. This is the rationed healthcare in Canada people talk of, but we might have it worst (along with very small communities) as all the seniors from the rest of Canada want to move here to avoid harsh winters and snow. Another unforced error for my folks. Now they are wait listed for a GP even willing to have a wait list and it's over a year long wait usually. On the plus side, we don't go into debt for generations to get a needed surgery or whatever.

It does work, in an ideal model, where greed is not a factor and all tax savings are reinvested in infrastructure, thereby improving business, which leads to increased wages and more spending money for the workers, who then put their excess wages to work in the economy, buying luxury goods and further stimulating those businesses, spreading the wealth.

Where the problem lies is, one, the Marginal Propensity to Save is much lower than the Marginal Propensity to Consume, so that the money doesn't get reinvested, it gets spent on junk; and, two, tax cuts to the wealthy do not account for greed, which just has them try to hang onto the money and spend nothing, but make more money off of it.  So, they increased income taken at the top never leaves a certain level of investment and never trickles down to workers outside of very narrow industries.

We used to laugh our heads off at Friedman's theories in my economics courses.  Keynes' theories, which were buried in the Reagan and Thatcher years, with more dirt thrown on them by governments, since then, have the weight of evidence and history to support them.  They work great.  Spend money on infrastructure, in an economic downturn and build for the future, which both stimulates the economy and creates long term improvement in the community.  Then, curtail the spending when the economic recovery is in full swing.  The part that government got wrong, when they actually used Keynesian models was that they spent on the wrong things, gave money to cronies and kept the spending going when the economy was booming.  Keynes only proposed it for the period of the downturn and not perpetually.

Of course, the real truth in economics came from John Kenneth Galbraith, who said “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

His son, James Galbraith, has had the only economic books worth reading, in recent years, in my opinion, as he illustrates how free market theories are BS and how the basic supply and demand intersection is manipulated by modern companies, for their own gain, at the expense of the consumer.

Economics sounded like an interesting topic to pursue in college (my degree is in it); but, after 4 years, I had notebooks filled with supply and demand graphs and the realization that it is about as accurate as weather forecasting by the tv news guy, who doesn't have a degree in meterology.  That is one of the reasons why I work for a printing and shipping company (that and spending too many contented years in retail management, only to get trapped in it when my dream job turned sour).

It's a measure of a society how they treat their most vulnerable, weakest and poorest members.

As someone who was born in, grew up with, and (I hope for my kids' sake) will be certified dead with a state-run, free (for the most part), socialised healthcare system, I look at what you guys have to live with in North America with incredulity and despair.

It's not scary - tax the rich to keep the poorer members of your society healthy. It's not just decent humanity it's good economics. Ill (or dead) poor people don't buy stuff. Happy, healthy people buy stuff.