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Concerned about income inequality? Meet one of the causes.

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There's one thing we learned for sure this election year: If you want to get people excited, promise to fix the economy.

Every economist and politician worth their salt have different ideas about how we can close the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and there's one tried-and-true solution that lots of them keep coming back to: trickle-down economics. But aside from being named after something that conjures up images of faucets clogged with who-knows-what, what exactly are they? And, more importantly, do they work?

To answer that question, we need to go back a few decades.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan became president after promising to reinvigorate the economy by cutting taxes on wealthy Americans.

Their wealth, he promised, would inspire them to spend more on their businesses, creating jobs and wealth for the people in income brackets below them. Those people would do the same, albeit with less cash to spend, and their spent wealth would "trickle down" to the poorest of the poor. The rich would benefit, and the poor would benefit from the rich. Everyone wins!

Reagan introduces his tax plan, which he never referred to as trickle-down economics, calling it "Reaganomics" or "supply-side economics" instead. Image via Reagan Library/Wikimedia Commons.

Trickle-down economics sounds like an idea that might work. Except its benefits are, to put it mildly, not exactly as advertised. Here are a few important reasons why:

1. Trickle down really trickles right back up.

Image by Heather Libby/Upworthy.

According to smart folks who studied the impact of Reagan's tax cuts, the wealth he promised would "trickle down" ended up "trickling mostly up," making income inequality worse. Between 1979 and 2005, after-tax household income rose 6% for the bottom fifth. That sounds great until you see what happened for the top fifth — an 80% increase in income. That split has become even worse since then. Income inequality has never been higher — and under a new president taxes might go lower than ever.

2. It adds a middleman who really doesn't need (or want) to be there.

This boy will probably pass on the apple to its intended recipient. A corporation? Not so much. Image via iStock.

Let's say you want to give someone near you an apple. You could either hand them the apple yourself or you could give it to someone else to eat and hope they share at least some of it with the person you wanted to give it to in the first place.

Trickle-down economics works the same way. Instead of creating a social program to help give wealth and support to lower- and middle-income people, the government instead gives tax cuts to wealthy earners. It relies on them to create the spark that will generate wealth and support for the lower classes. Which leads to the next point:

3. If wealth were to potentially trickle down, it would take a loooooong time for even an incremental gain. Like 40 years long.

A long-term study of trickle-down economics by the Harvard Kennedy School found that with trickle-down economics, it would take 40 years for the bottom 90% of the population to see a 5% rise in their income. One of the study's authors likened this approach to being "like giving people aspirin when they have cancer."

Their recommendation, instead of trying to make trickle-down economics work, was to focus on raising up the poor and middle class. According to the authors: "Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time."

In recent years, plenty of politicians — and some surprising other voices — have joined the chorus against trickle-down economics.

During a famous 2011 speech, President Barack Obama railed against the tax policies that created trickle-down economics.

In 2013, Pope Francis echoed Obama's concerns.

There's one guaranteed way to create an economic model that increases wealth, and it involves turning the trickle-down pyramid upside down.

A famous study by the International Monetary Fund looked at what happens when governments prioritize helping the poor. Increasing the income share of the bottom 20% of earners by just 1% would increase the GDP by nearly half a percentage point.

Doing what trickle-down economics argues for and giving a 1% increase to the top 20% of earners does the opposite and ends up decreasing the GDP. Cue the sad trombone noise.

A majority of modern economists see the flaws in trickle-down economics. There's one important person who doesn't, though.

And he's going to become president on Jan. 20.

Image via Bastiaan Slabbers/Getty Images.

President-elect Donald Trump has been clear about his plans for American taxes. Like Reagan, he wants to cut tax rates for corporations and drop the tax rate to 15% for the top 1% of earners. This kind of policy, he promises, will make America great again. For the millions of voters who cast ballots for him, that's statistically unlikely to be the case.

These bread revolts changed history. We should know why.

The history of bread wars have a lot to tell us about conflicts today.

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You might have heard the saying "We're only three square meals away from anarchy."

It turns out that for many people throughout the centuries, that meal was ... bread.

Bread is actually one of the oldest, cheapest prepared foods in the world, with archeological evidence dating it back at least 30,000 years.

Historical accounts of breadmaking often say the Roman Pliny the Elder first detailed how the skim from beer was used to aerate bread. In ancient Egypt, the workers who built the pyramids are believed to have been given a daily allowance of bread loaves.

Grain farmers in ancient Egypt. Image via iStock.

Even today, a word used in Egypt for bread is "aish," which means "life." It's also considered haram, or taboo, to cut bread with a knife in many Middle Eastern countries.

If you're like many Americans, you might wonder what your love/hate relationship with all of that gluten-y, carbelicious goodness has to do with centuries of civil conflict or even the recent Syrian crisis.

It turns out that there's an actual historical correlation between an increase in grain prices and civil unrest.

A crowd throws bread in Stockport, Lancashire, in 1842. Image via Getty Images.

That's because bread, a magical alchemy of grain, yeast, and water, has managed to sustain poor people for centuries. Historically, when people could no longer afford bread, they knew they would starve. So they revolted.

Entire nations have even toppled because of a lack of access to bread. We might not realize it, but bread uprisings throughout history have a lot to tell us about the global crises of today.

Here are five of the bread revolts that have changed the course of history:

1. Flour Wars, France, 1775

Original lithograph of the French Revolution, 1789. Image via Getty Images.

Surprisingly, Marie-Antoinette may never have told French peasants to eat cake. According to historians, it might have actually been France's famous Flour Wars that played a major role in the French Revolution. Catalyzed by a poor grain yield and rising grain prices, scholars found more than 652 French food-based riots from 1760 to 1789 that ultimately led to the French Revolution in 1789.

2. Flour Riots, New York, 1837

Representation of depressed economic situation in America before the panic of 1837. Image via Getty Images.

When a depression caused flour to jump from $7 per barrel to $20 in 1837, two New York companies, Eli Hart & Co. and S.H. Herrick & Co., were accused of hoarding it. The public took action, and soon after, rioters destroyed 500 bushels of flour and 1,000 barrels of wheat in Hart's shop. The mob grew so violent that they had to be restrained by the Seventh Regiment.

3. Richmond Bread Riots, 1863

Southern women feel the effects of the rebellion and create bread riots. Image via Library of Congress.

In 1863, a mob of Confederate housewives took to the streets with axes in Richmond, Virginia, chanting "bread or blood" while ransacking and looting shops for flour. Prompted by flour prices that had risen 10 times in two years as well as dealing with a tone-deaf leader, the women decided to take things into their own hands. They didn't take just the flour — they took a wagon of beef and 500 pounds of bacon, too.

4. Egyptian Bread Riots, Egypt, 1977

A woman protests with bread in Cairo in 2007. Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images.

In 1977, Egypt decided to stop subsidizing basic food staples such as wheat and bread. As a result, many poor Egyptians took to the streets. Hundreds were killed, and even more were injured. The riots went on for two days until the government reinstated the wheat subsidies that so many poor Egyptians depended upon.

But that wasn't Egypt's last bread revolt...

5. The Arab Spring, 2008-2011

A protester holds bread in Tunisia in 2010. Photo by Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images.

In 2008, sudden global increases in grain prices compounded with inflation that led to riots in Egypt, reminding a lot of people of the tumultuous events of 31 years prior. Government-subsidized flour, which had once sold for $3.14 per 100 kilograms, suddenly shot to $377 on the black market. Because 40% of Egyptians lived in poverty, many of them couldn't afford to live without the bread that the government helped them afford. Riots swept the nation, and several people were killed in front of government bakeries.

In 2010, as global grain prices continued to rise, Tunisians also began to revolt, bread in hand. The toppling of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 became the climactic beginning of a major destabilizing shift of an entire region, known as the Arab Spring.

Many people said the Arab Spring was a revolution of the hungry.

Egyptian protestors hold bread in 2013. Photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images.

The current crisis in Syria is also a prime example of what can happen when people don't have enough to eat.

Though it might be hard to fully understand Syria's current problems, some researchers think that it has to do in part with access to bread. At one point, Syria was the only country in the entire region that was completely self-sufficient in food production, specifically in wheat crops such as barley.

Experts have argued that it was a massive crop failure due to drought and possible climate change from 2006 to 2009 that drove Syrian farmers to finally challenge their ruler. When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fired back, he also explicitly targeted bread bakeries that fell under rebel control.

For much of the world's poor, bread is a life-sustaining necessity. But numerous factors, such as worldwide droughts, are causing grain to become harder and harder to grow.

Syria and Egypt are part of what was once known as the Fertile Crescent, the area of the world where people first started to grow grain and form civilizations. But now, the grain that once made their lands famous is becoming harder and harder to access. When this delicate balance of access to basic foods is upset, history shows us that whole communities — and entire nations — can topple.

If history is an indication, where bread and grain become scarce, civil unrest follows. Now that's something to chew on.

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When customers at one San Francisco grocery store went to the checkout one day, they were outraged. The cost of their groceries had increased astronomically.

Look, we've all cringed once or twice while the cashier rings up the fancy yogurt we decided to get last minute because "screw it, I wanna eat fancy yogurt," but this wasn't a few pennies or dollars here and there. This was $25 for a box of spinach and $40 for a loaf of bread and some cigarettes.

GIF via Tipping Point Community/YouTube.

The cost of their groceries had inflated. But why?

It was all part of a social experiment meant to show people what buying groceries is like for people living in poverty.

1 in 10 families in the Bay Area live on $24,300 or less per year, below the poverty line and well below the Bay Area average. The experiment was set up by Tipping Point Community, a poverty relief organization, which set up a register in a Nob Hill grocery store where customers checking out would be given "poverty line prices," or prices that were proportionally representative to living in poverty.

"If eggs cost $6 for someone living on the poverty line, or 1.4% of their weekly salary, the adjusted price would be $29.64 for someone living on the average San Francisco salary," TPC's website explains.

Imagine if your groceries, rent and college supplies were five times as expensive. For the 1 in 10 families living below the poverty line in the Bay Area, this is how it feels. Visit tippingpoint.org to calculate how expensive your basic needs would be if adjusted for #povertylineprices
A photo posted by Tipping Point Community (@tippingpoint) on Nov 17, 2016 at 1:26pm PST

Tipping Point also set up a website where anyone can plug in their annual salary and see what grocery shopping would be like if they lived in poverty.

While those skyrocketed prices were temporarily frustrating for the people trying to buy groceries, the sticker shock they experienced is one millions of Americans face every day.

In 2015, over 43 million people in the United States were living in poverty. That's down 1.2% from 2014 but is still a massive number. Sticker shock doesn't just affect people below the poverty line either. According to the Corporation for Enterprise Development, nearly half of all Americans are one financial shock — a job loss, a medical emergency, etc. — away from poverty. Feeling financial discomfort while you shop for basic needs is something that could happen to any of us.

The income gap between the rich and poor in the United States is ever-widening, and closing it would require landmark financial restructuring, or at least some out-of-the-box thinking.

If you had to pay $30 for cold medicine or $15 for a gallon of milk, you might be outraged like the folks in the video. Most of all though, you'd want to do something about it. You'd want somebody to recognize that it's an unfair burden on you and your family.

You'd want things to change.

Watch people react to poverty line prices here:

In 2015, Roman Ostriakov was sentenced to six months in an Italian jail for attempting to steal $4.50 worth of cheese and sausage.

Ostriakov was convicted for stealing cheese and sausage. Photo via torange.biz.

His sentence was finally overturned this week by a panel of judges for the sort of reason that restores your faith in humanity just a little bit.

Italy's Supreme Court in Rome. Photo by Tiziana Fabi/Getty Images.

According to a BBC report, the judges ruled that because Ostriakov was homeless and had stolen the food because he was desperately hungry, the theft was not a crime.

A man in Italy sleeps outside a train station. Photo by Tiziana Fabi/Getty Images.

The ruling was a stunning display of compassion and a rare acknowledgment of the cost of being poor.

A man in India eats in a prison yard after having been rounded up for begging on the street. Photo by Chandan Khanna/Getty Images.

Ostriakov's conviction and acquittal highlights the often harsh (and disproportionate) punishment meted out to crimes that are born out of poverty and desperation.

In the United States, things like conviction and sentencing disparities for crack versus cocaine and petty theft versus financial crime serve to reinforce the notion that being poor deserves an increased level of criminal scrutiny.

There is evidence that poverty — even when less extreme — primes people to make negative decisions.

A 2013 study, published in the journal Science, found that for the subjects of the experiment, who were poor, worrying about money noticeably impaired their ability to perform well on unrelated spacial and reasoning tasks.

Rather than wasting public resources throwing people in prison for being hungry, we can and should use those resources to make sure they're not hungry in the first place.

Photo by Paul Sableman/Flickr.

In the U.S., that means supporting programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as SNAP or food stamps), which feeds millions of the hungriest Americans every year despite frequent efforts to draw down its funding or defund it entirely. It's not always sufficient, but it's often better than nothing — and ultimately a fairly small component (2.3%) of the federal budget.

Recently, more radical measures like universal basic income, which would provide in place of targeted social programs, have gained some traction with advocates on both sides of the aisle.

We can't give everyone a free pass, but we certainly give them enough of a hand that they shouldn't need one.

People eat at a food bank in New York City. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

An editorial in an Italian newspaper — translated by the BBC — hailed the ruling for being a guided by a concept that "informed the Western world for centuries — it is called humanity."

Better yet, let's extend that humanity to hungry people before they're forced to a choice to steal or starve — a choice that no person should have to make.

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Rep. Paul Ryan did something that is all too rare in politics.

Paul Ryan. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

He admitted he was wrong.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

For a long time, Ryan (R-Wisconsin) had divided Americans into two groups: "makers," working people who contribute to society, and "takers," (mostly) poorer people who depend on government benefits.

A Florida woman looks for a job at a placement office in 2014. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Here's how he put it at a fundraiser in Wisconsin in 2012:

"Do you want the American idea of an opportunity society with a safety net where you can take a risk, start a business, make a difference, succeed and be honored for being successful? Or do we go down the path the president is proposing — a social welfare state, a cradle-to-the-grave society where we have more takers than makers."

And here's how he framed it earlier, speaking to a fellow Republican congressman in 2010:

"Right now about 60 percent of the American people get more benefits in dollar value from the federal government than they pay back in taxes. So we’re going to a majority of takers versus makers in America and that will be tough to come back from that."

But this year, Ryan had a revelation: Most people don't take government aid because they like free stuff. They take it because they need it to survive.

A girl pays for food with an EBT card. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

According to the USDA, in 75% of all households that both received food stamps and had a member who was able to work, that person had a job in the year before or after receiving the benefit.

How did Ryan realize he was wrong? By listening to actual poor people.

A New York City man guides a cart of recyclable cans down the street. Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images.

Here's what he had to say in his speech. It's really, really different than the way he's framed the issue many times before (emphasis added):

"There was a time that I would talk about a difference between 'makers' and 'takers' in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized something. I realized that I was wrong. 'Takers' wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent. And to label a whole group of Americans that way was wrong. I shouldn’t castigate a large group of Americans to make a point."

It's not just poor people who benefit from government assistance. Most of us do at some point in our lives.

The thing is, we're often unaware of it, according political scientist Suzanne Mettler, whose arguments were summarized by The Washington Post in 2015. That's because the benefits that most of us receive — for things like housing and health care or through the GI Bill, if we're veterans — often come to us through lower tax bills rather than as cash handed directly to us.

If we live long enough, most of us will eventually collect Social Security or have our medical bills paid through Medicare.

There's still plenty not to love about Ryan's approach to poverty, which doesn't do much to reflect his change of heart. Yet.

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

His 2014 anti-poverty plan still includes provisions that make the poorest Americans jump through hoops in order to receive benefits while wealthier Americans continue to receive tax credits for things like mortgages and college tuition "just because."

But at least where his thinking is concerned, he's starting to get it. And that's progress.

As Ryan said in his speech, "People with different ideas, they're not traitors. They're not our enemies. They're our neighbors."

It's possible to disagree with Ryan — on this or even on most things — and still believe he deserves credit for listening, grappling, and changing his tune on the poorest Americans.

You can watch Ryan's full address here. The important part starts at 9:40: