We have had 30 years of "Trickle-Down Economics" and a huge chunk of the population still believes in it. President Obama has been saying he wants to build the economy from the "middle out" but it hasn't caught on as a catch-phrase.
Lets go below the squiggle for an alternative...
I, for one, would love to hear him use "Demand Driven Economics" because I think it would make more sense to people. Even uneducated people have a basic idea of capitalism as "supply and demand". It isn't hard to get them to understand where we are by saying something like this...
You need 2 things to drive an economy - demand for goods and investment in businesses to supply those goods. We've had 30 years of emphasizing investment and the result is that many corporations are sitting on vast cash reserves. There isn't enough demand to provide a good investment for that cash. We need to focus on creating demand now until we can get things in balance and to create demand we need to increase the income of the middle and lower classes.
There are lots of variations and ways to expand this (like give a little history of tax rates comparing rates in the boom years to now or compare the sources of taxes for those time periods) that are brief and easy to understand.
We have to get control of the narrative around the economy. We need to show that the economy has done better under dems than repubs and that states with repub governments are the poorest economically and in many social services that impact quality of life.
"Middle out" just isn't catching on and we can do better.