It Took the Democrats Half a Century to Rediscover Trickle-Up Economics While Republicans cling to trickle-down delusions, Biden is reviving a philosophy of growth that the party hasn’t embraced since LBJ. Alex Wong/Getty Images When Republicans began reformulating their tax philosophy in the late 1970s, they looked to their party’s policies in the 1920s for inspiration. I remember Jude Wanniski, the late conservative journalist, telling me that he knew nothing about Republican tax cuts in the 1920s until he read about them in Herb Stein’s 1969 book, The Fiscal Revolution in America . Today, Democrats may also find inspiration in economic debates of the 1920s—this one about whether underconsumption has slowed the rate of economic growth.