Creating a Wealthy Society Requires an Understanding of Economics and History

The meme here from a reader.

These really are five excellent sentences–for people who have no understanding of how the developed world became developed, and how the United States became the world’s super-power following the close of the Second World War.

High marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans and the corporations they control created a huge, well-educated, extremely productive and prosperous middle class.

Most of that is gone now. 40+ years of trickle-down economics has left the billionaire class with unprecedented wealth, and most common Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

This disease is almost entirely absent in the rest of the First World.  It has virtually no bearing on how people live in Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, Oceana, and the other most affluent countries dotted around the remainder of the globe.