What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . and What Other Countries Got Right / George R Tyler

Americans have long been proud of the strength and robustness of their economy. But the truth is economic inequality in the United States is now closer to a third-world country than to their first-world peers, and is growing. Many things have been blamed for these failures—globalization, outsourcing, economic cycles, weakening education, and so on—but the reality is that the failure of their economy stems directly from a set of political and economic choices voters have made since the early 1980s. This isn’t about the size of government or social welfare programs. And it isn’t about left versus right—prudent Australia, for example, had a right-wing government for many years and is ranked by the Heritage Foundation as far more free than the United States. It’s about policies on wages and corporate governance that have converted globalization to nationwide family prosperity and have been proven over decades to generate superior results.