Trickle-down economics is the theory that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will create jobs. It didn't work in the 80s when Reagan introduced it (and George H. W. Bush dubbed it "voodoo economics"), and it didn't work in the 2000s when George Bush introduced his tax cuts for the wealthy. In fact, some of the most prosperous times we had were in the 50s and 90s, when tax rates were higher than they are now.
The reason tax cuts don't create jobs is that corporations don't create jobs just to be nice. They do it to make money. And for the last 30 years it has been cheaper to create jobs in China, Singapore, Malaysia and Viet Nam. The only way jobs will be created in the US is to even the playing field, by raising the standard of living (and wages) in Asia, or by wage and benefit laws (as Europe does), or by restricting free markets in some way (which China and other Asian economies do), or by lowering the standard of living (and wages) in the United States.
The Republicans have been working to drive US wages down for years, and their efforts are now bearing fruit.
Driving down wages in the US is ultimately foolish. This is the most desirable market in the world because we're so consumer driven. But if our workers aren't making any money, they can't consume. That's why Henry Ford starting paying his workers fair wages -- he realized that people had to make enough money to buy his cars.
Most of the people running American corporations today aren't like Henry Ford. Most of them didn't actually start their businesses. They either inherited the wealth (like the Koch brothers and Donald Trump), or they're just hired gun CEOs. The Fords of today are guys like Bill Gates, who happens to think that rich people don't pay enough taxes.
The war on drugs is another failed boondoggle. Declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, it involved military action in foreign countries where drugs are produced, drastically increasing prison sentences for drug offenses in the US, and even confiscating assets of people merely suspected of (not convicted of) drug crimes.
It has been an absolute failure. Our prisons are full. Mexico is practically a failed state because the criminals smuggling drugs into the US run rampant there. And drug use is unabated. We learned the lesson with Prohibition, why are we so dim-witted on drugs?
Lastly there's health care. The United States almost had socialized medicine in the 1950s. But many corporations at that time decided to provide health care as a fringe benefit, a cheap (at the time) recruiting tool. Since then, health care costs have been rising much faster than the general rate of inflation.
Countries like Sweden, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand spend much less than the United States on health care. They all have socialized medicine, and all have higher life expectancy rates. Some claim that this is due to more homogeneous populations and cultures, but that's wrong: Canada, Australia and New Zealand are immigrant nations like the United States, with a majority European ancestry, plus small indigenous populations and a wide variety of other ethnicities.
Some people blame rising health care costs on expensive new technologies. The odd thing is, similar technologies have increased productivity and reduced costs in all other industries in the United States. You would think that better imaging would drastically increase diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. New non-invasive arthroscopic surgical techniques have revolutionized orthopedic medicine: patients who underwent procedures that put them in the hospital for weeks 20 years ago now walk out the same day.
With all those advances, how can modern medicine be so much more expensive (in real terms and in terms of percentage of GDP) than it used to be?
The two big reasons are the health insurance model, and the health insurance companies themselves.
Insurance is just the wrong idea. Health care isn't like getting hit by a hurricane -- everyone will use health care, no matter how healthy they are. We all need immunizations and regular medical checkups, we all come down with colds, we all sprain our ankles, we all have children (or were once children). We all face the same dangers from epidemics like swine flu or E. coli outbreaks. The vast majority of us will have some kind of disease or require some kind of treatment for a non-trivial ailment, and the sooner we discover our problems the cheaper they are to deal with. And we all get old.
It behooves us all for everyone to be healthy -- sick coworkers cause us more work and cause employers to lose money. So it just makes sense to pool our resources to fund our common health care, the same way we pool our resources to fund fire and police departments. Certain individuals use the police and fire departments more than others, but we all contribute the same (unless we abuse those services).
But health insurance is a big business, and a very profitable one. These companies suck up a third of all our medical expenditures, and they're pure overhead. A bunch of useless corporate fat-cat bureaucrats, they decide who lives and who dies. And, like any big business, the only consideration is how much money they'll make. If denying coverage to those who need it most means a 20% boost in profits, that's what's gonna happen.
So, why do these three ideas retain so much currency among conservatives even though they haven't worked in 30 or 40 or 50 years? To quote Deep Throat from the Nixon era: follow the money.