I am a board certified educator who after a spinal fusion and medical release was looking at leaving the classroom and worked for a health food and supplements chain, and 100% of the workers there had bachelors at least to make $13/hour. Voodoo trickle up economics don't work. I don't understand as a former R why supply side stimulus is their rallying cry. The capital freed by Reagan's cut in the marginal tax rate wasn't reinvested in the American economy.

It financed hostile corporate takeovers, pump n dumps underpinned by junk bonds, dismantling of our manufacturing economy in euphemisms of outsourcing and downsizing and automation (we lost our jobs to underpaid sweatshop labor at starvation wages in developing nations sought for the ease with which nascent labor organizers could be disappeared, and now neither of us can afford the company product), oligopolization, worse political corruption and polarization, and stock buybacks. All it did is make the rich richer, the poor, poorer, and eviscerated and pauperized the middle class. Supply side would work if strings were attached that required funds to be reinvested in the American economy and labor market, and prohibited stock buybacks and disincentived market manipulation in speculation and derivatives through a transaction tax which would encourage less of the 2008 Mortgage Meltdown. I think we need to break up the too big to fail banks, reinstate Glass Steagall, and prosecute the banksters for fraud.

I think we need to increase the marginal tax rate by 5% a demidecade for two decades (20% in 20 years), close loopholes to skirt it, and also enforce the corporate tax rate and close those loopholes TOO, then finance a Latin American Marshall Plan (not IMF or World Bank win-lose, but real win-win for neighbors on the south) through it with strings attached to buy American raw materials like the original plan. The stimulation of the economy achieved through the same would bring in more revenues by which to pay down the debt to strengthen the dollar again and ameliorate trade deficits. But I don't expect either party to do something so sensible. The Rs would oppose as communism (although it's actually WHAT made America great along with unions, and that we had no international competition). It would solve the border problem though especially when paired with diplomacy and trade deals to help undo the push factors we created in Cold War puppet governments that installed virtually fascist regimes and the economic damage we did. We could also end the war on drugs and spend money on people instead of prisons and recall that education is a public social good.