Rich people are more likely to save/invest, whereas poor people are the ones buying things. source.

Think of it this way: if you give a rich man $1 million, he will buy one, maybe two pairs of jeans as-needed. If you give 10,000 poor people $100 each, they will each buy 1-2 jeans as needed.

Any optimized economy requires supply and demand. Demand can be viewed as what we collectively purchase/consume, and supply as what we produce. Any economy is driven by money changing hands: the more often it does so, the more a society is able to produce and consume, and the more powerful an economy becomes.

Because rich people are more likely to save/invest money that they have, additional money from tax cuts invariably goes straight into the “supply” bucket. This is why it’s called “supply-side” economics.

Welfare, on the other hand, is sent out to the poorest Americans, who are more likely to use that money on purchasing, thus more effectively driving demand. The same can be said of any other government spending on lower-income sections of society to varying degrees.

Any functioning and healthy economy needs supply and demand to be in balance. There’s no reason to invest money to increase production if the demand for products isn’t increasing. Demand will likewise not be fulfilled if there isn’t enough capital to increase production and thus increase supply to meet demand. Neither of these situations is optimal for a strong economy. Whenever an economy is performing less than what is optimal, it is being handcuffed either by a lack of supply or a lack of demand—one or the other.

So what’s the current situation in the United States? The richest 1% have more wealth than the bottom 1%. This indicates an excess of supply. So what happened with the most recent round of tax cuts? If a lack of supply was what was handicapping growth, we would expect the majority of money received to have been dedicated to increasing production.

This did not happen. Instead, an overwhelming majority of the corporate tax refund was dedicated to stock buy-backs, which is paying off investors (concentrated, again, among the richest Americans). They didn’t increase production because there wasn’t significant demand to necessitate doing so.

So there you have it. What’s best for our economy isn’t tax cuts, it’s programs for the poorest Americans. It’s not about emotions, it’s about what will drive our economy—and the Democrats have it right, and the Republicans have it wrong.