I think George H.W. Bush's description in the 1980 presidential primaries, calling it "Voodoo Economics" was an honest evaluation of it.
They needed to fund a Study to figure that out????!!!!????????
This was so obvious to everyone except those who stood to benefit the most from it: The Very Rich! Everyone knows that anything that "trickles" is going to eventually clog up and anything at the bottom is going to lose out. They apply the same principle to the watershed out west. They take as much water as they can for the wealthy farms at the head of the system, meanwhile the largest numbers of people at the end are left with a trickle of water.