“We’re going to turn the bull loose,” proclaimed an effusive Ronald Reagan on March 28, 1985. The setting, fittingly enough, was the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the president had clearly found himself among a friendly crowd. Chants of “Eight more years!” and “Ronnie, Ronnie!” came from the audience as Reagan looked on, beaming. It was the first time an incumbent president had visited the trading floor in the Stock Exchange’s entire, nearly two hundred–year history — and the setting was not mere happenstance. “With tax reform and budget control,” Reagan declared, “our economy will be free to expand to its full potential, driving the bears back into permanent hibernation.”

It can be easy to forget, but the Reaganite economic project billed itself as a populist one. “Turning the bull loose” conjured the image of a powerful and dynamic beast ensnared by taxes and regulation which, once unmoored, would be free to unleash its energy at full speed. Though Reagan was speaking to financiers on that day in 1985, the supposed promise of his program was that gains at the top would be felt by everyone. With the necessary impediments removed, a common prosperity lay just over the next horizon.

Nearly forty years on, it’s sometimes said that trickle-down economics didn’t work — a statement that technically rings true if we go by its own official rhetoric. An alternative, and more accurate framing might be that it actually has worked as an effective means for the upward redistribution of wealth, which was more or less the whole point all along. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the growth of CEO pay, the focus of a newly published study by Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra of the Economic Policy Institute.