Ignore the amounts of money going to the top 1% of society - look at
how money works to see the real problem. The United States sells paper to buy oil. Rather than face the music, America, in the 1980's was unwilling to engage in the austerity and conservation needed to end the energy deficit - what we import from abroad. Instead, we sold paper - largely debt - to buy oil.
This has a rough and ready effect - it limits consumption of oil to the rate of "productivity" - namely, how much paper you can generate for a given amount of consumption. Let me rephrase that for the non-econogeeks out there. Wages to the majority of workers become "consumption" - most of us spend as much as we earn, or close to it, if not more than we earn. Consumption, sooner or later, becomes consumption of oil. GDP is the amount of paper we generate - money - for the economic activity we have. Thus "productivity" - the fedsession of Greenspan - is how much paper (GDP) we generate for the consumption of oil (wages). This is why in the Reaganite economy real wages can't rise any faster than "productivity".
While this dressed up in all sorts of advertisingese to get people to believe that how we have organized the economy is good - and that somehow we should all act as if the rich people own the world and the rest of us just rent the air we breath from them - the basic reality is this: until the US ends the energy deficit, we are going to be stuck in one form or another of the Reaganite economy. Clinton merely added a codicile - he focused on generating stock market paper.
The problem with this, as with previous attempts to print money that wasn't really based on the bottleneck commodity, is that it turned into a bubble that burst. Now why it did this is simple: everyone knew the dance was going to end, and no one wanted to say stop the music. So America kept sending Republicans to congress who would prevent the music from stopping. Clinton's hands were tied.
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