Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--and Those Fighting to Reverse It

The protected overmatched, overran, and paralyzed the government.

The world’s richest country continues to have the highest poverty rate among the thirty-five nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), except for Mexico. (It is tied in second to last place with Israel, Chile, and Turkey.)

Specifically, in 1928, the top 1 percent accounted for 24 percent of all income. In 1970 the one-percenters’ share of the wealth was down to about 9 percent, the result of multiple economic dynamics and government policies, including the New Deal reforms and the post-war growth in the 1950s and 1960s of the country’s manufacturing base and, with it

Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have nearly tripled.

mortgages. That compelled him, he later told the Financial Crisis

Despite spending more on health care and K–12 education per capita than any other developed country, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse internationally. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy among its peer countries, and among the thirty-five OECD countries American chil

Shareholder democracy turned out to be a threat to actual democracy.

That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s: The

protected versus the unprotected. Enhancing the common good versus maximizing and protecting the elite winners’ winnings.