There is something on the order of $3.5 trillion in corporate coffers (including off-shored cash) plus excess Federal reserves of depository institutions.
How much money is that?
Enough to fund five million jobs for ten years at an average salary of $35,000/year - and that's assuming a generous 100% markup on the salaries to account for benefits and overhead.
I'm not an economist, so this is almost certainly apropos of nothing, but I have to say, it's an odd coincidence. And, in the words of the fictional Lt. Aldo Raine, "Yeah, we got a word for that kinda odd in English. It's called suspicious."
Do I think therefore that salaries have simply been pocketed? Not really. I think that not creating jobs is doing the holders of the cash just fine; if they could make a penny more by hiring rather than not hiring, they'd be all over it.
It's just stunning to see the scale of the ocean of cash relative to the ocean of available labor, considering that there is all kinds of public work that definitely needs doing, and somehow our system is so broken - one major symptom of which of course is monolithic GOP anti-progress - that the recovery is a trickle when it should logically be a flood.
But my suspicion is that the number one issue is the Bullshit Bubble. There are all kinds of inefficiencies and liquidity and leveraging and de-leveraging and blah blah blah going on that explain the stagnation. Also, the lack of ponies and confidence fairies. But in the end, our entire capital enterprise has been hijacked by Bullshitters, people who are betting on the horses rather than riding them and certainly rather than training or cleaning up after them. It may even be that a majority the Bullshit sector is actually wagering on the performance of the bettors and the bookies, rather than on the races themselves! And of course there is a big business in bundling hedged bookie and bettor bets into Bullshit derivatives which are then leveraged as if they were equity.
All bubbles burst and the Bullshit Bubble's bursting is overdue. We thought it burst in 2008, but very quickly it became clear that while actual assets have collapsed, the Bullshit roadshow has just moved on to new cons and manipulations.
When the Bullshit Bubble bursts - and I'm suddenly realizing Michael Moore made the Pigshit Bubble analogy in Dude Where's My Country? so h/t to the man - will all that money rain down as job-creating dollars or will it be mopped-up by job-killing derivative flimflammery?
So one needn't wonder why history's greatest and most progressive economic expansions occurred during high-tax regimes: what happens when the wealthy and big corporations need to shelter their windfalls? It would appear there is the unintended side-effect of jobs being created rather than destroyed.
Oh, and all the good, low-paying jobs slowly got shipped to China over the past thirty years. There's that.