I never studied economics, Phat. I don't really know the answers to your questions. I think the idea of tax breaks for the wealthy is to incentivize them to to use their money in the economy, to invest it in business, to buy stuff, to get that money ball rolling. But you can't predict what people are actually going to do. It turns out that the wealthy tend to act criminally with thier excess and we can't trust them to do the right thing.
I'm not sure that you can build an economy from the ground up (short of starting everything over). Think about this: If you took all the money and evenly distributed to every single person, wouldn't it just end up concentrating back to a small group of people? Poor people are bad with money and rich people are good with it. That's how they get that way.
I think we're fucked either way. Either we put too much effort into helping the poor to the point that the middle has enough and gives up, or we let the rich take the wheel and screw the middle out of their share.
This country's going downhill. I tried to care but my opinions are inhumane. So fuck it, I'm out. You guys can have it just leave me the fuck alone.