> It seems like, idk, maybe we should do our best to put money in the pockets of the poorest people (regardless of the cost) and create the postwar great societ

> It seems like, idk, maybe we should do our best to put money in the pockets of the poorest people (regardless of the cost) and create the postwar great society that JFK and LBJ were championing. There may never again be a Great Society middle class, regardless of economic policy. Most of the discussion I've seen about how to return to the post-war golden age misses how important the post-war aspect was for US success. The US was the only industrialized country left intact after WWII, making it an export superpower on top of being a military superpower. Confidence in the American economy lead to the Bretton Woods system, enshrining the dollar as the global reserve currency, giving Americans enormous buying power, and leading to the US controlling over two-thirds of the world's gold by the 1950s. Compared to Europe and Japan, the US also had vastly more room to grow its agricultural and mineral production, and thus its economy. Those unique advantages have dimished. Other countries have caught up in industrialization and the delta between the US and the rest of the world has shrunk. For the middle class to be rich again, the US would have to get comparatively richer relative to the rest of the world market, but the trend is in the opposite direction. Even significantly reducing the wealth gap wouldn't bring back the comparative wealth of the middle class of previous decades.