The only people who believed it were rich people and republicans who think if they suck up to rich people enough they will become rich

The problem I run into with family is if you collect it all together and call it trickle-down economics it's "obviously that won't work", but then they turn around and basically just keep repeating all the parts separately anyways. It's similar to the doublespeak I hear from those same people about how unions are a scam that are just out to screw everyone while also, all the people they know who are union retired 10 years before them with big nest eggs and they should have joined the union when they were young.

I remember these ideas being taught in my elementary economics classes in high school. It seemed mainstream and less fringy then.

Your experience matches mine- I only ever heard "trickle down economics" used by people on the left making mocking, derisive commentary about Reagan and neocon politics.

Then someone pointed out to me that my entire affluent, privileged, comfortable life is due to trickle down economics. In the last 15 years, I've had high salaries paid by various money-losing startups, financed by rich people investing in VC funds. Now I'm a millionaire, entirely as a transfer of wealth from the rich. I haven't had a job where my salary was realistically paid by customer money/business revenue since before 2010 or where any of the VCs ever made their investment back.

I don't know if there's any lesson to learn from that or if it's just funny or ironic, but it is kinda entertaining to me to realize the entire Venture Capital backed economy can be seen as trickle-down economics "working".

Trickle down is just another layer of this onion of fraud. The bit of the onion with the syn-Propanethial S-oxide that makes your eyes water? Fiat currency