Can anyone really justify trickle down economics?

The term of deflation is rarely used when describing the freemarket economy in the United States, but add it to your vocabulary for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. While I will continue to encourage students not to use Wikipedia as a direct source for speech's and papers I will use the explanation presentented by the nice people of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Deflation is the opposite of inflation. Therefore, under the usual contemporary definition of inflation, 'deflation' means a decrease in the general price level(Barro & Grilli, 1994, p.142)

In economic theory, deflation is a general reduction in the level of prices, or of the prices of an entire kind of asset or commodity. Deflation should not be confused with temporarily falling prices; instead, it is a sustained fall in general prices. In the IS/LM model (that is, the Income and Saving equilibrium/ Liquidity Preference and Money Supply equilibrium model), deflation is caused by a shift in the supply and demand curve for goods and interest, particularly a fall in the aggregate level of demand. That is, there is a fall in how much the whole economy is willing to buy, and the going price for goods. Because the price of goods is falling, consumers have an incentive to delay purchases and consumption until prices fall further, which in turn reduces overall economic activity - contributing to the deflationary spiral.

The New York Times today featured an article by JACK HEALY concerning the fear of defelation taking place due to the 1 percent fall in the Consumer price Index this month.

A key measure of how much Americans pay for groceries, clothing, entertainment and other goods and services, fell 1 percent in October, according to the Labor Department, the biggest drop in the 61-year history of the consumer price index. Much of the decline could be traced to a sharp drop of 14 percent in the price of gasoline, but the cost of a broad range of goods including clothes, milk and vegetables also fell sharply.....
The talk about falling prices is all the more remarkable because just a few months ago many economists were concerned about inflation and the prospect of stagflation, in
which inflation and unemployment rise simultaneously.
“It’s funny that just a few months ago everyone was wringing their hands over inflation,” said NarimanBehravesh, chief economist at Global Insight. “It’s gone. It’s over.”(Healy, NYT 2008)

The fact that their are economic analyzt surprised at about the pending deflation to economy ask why. my reason for asking is if the Free market Capitalism economic model is partialiy dependend on the concept of Supply side ecomonics(Supply & Demand). If you have an item and there is high demand for it the price will go up (inflation). It has been the general consesus for many years the USA has become consumer nation, that lives way above its means due to the accessibility to credit that excisted before this current financial downturn. If the country has increased the unemployment rate in the last year by 2 percentage points, the price of gas and other goods increased to the point that families had to make a choice between food and gas. Of couse demand for all the extra crap that is marketed to the masses will decrease. With that decrease of demand its only natural that the sellers have to lower their prices to remain viable in a different market plaace. How is it so inconcivible that deflation is occuring, an should occur to some extent to return the market to a true equilibrium?
I am just dissapointed at the education of the American people is so far lacking that the general public is not equiped with the lingo and knowledge to understand something that effects them so much. I guess that was the goal of the powers that be. And no, there is nothing funny about confused economic analyst who are just playing catchup because their economic predictive models were proven to be invalid.