Excepts

"Through most of America's history, our economic life was similar to that of other countries that practiced unregulated capitalism. Charles Dickens wrote about that era in most of his novels, including Christmas Carol.

There was a small 1% that owned about 90% of the nation's wealth. A small middle class of professionals (doctors, lawyers, retail shop owners, etc.) who worked for the 1% making up around 10%-25% of the population. And a very large cohort of the working poor."

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"Keynes and FDR (and Francis Perkins) had this wild idea that it should be possible to create a nation where at least two-thirds of the people were in the middle class.

They'd do it by heavily taxing the morbidly rich (FDR raised it to 77% in 1936), giving union power to working people (Wagner Act, 1935), and providing a solid social safety net " Social Security (1935), a minimum wage (1933/38), unemployment insurance (1935), and Food Stamps (1939) " to create a middle-class floor."

"Thus, Ronald Reagan came to the White House in 1981 with a simple mandate: cut the middle class down to size to restore social and political stability. To save the nation."

MUCH more at the link... a cogent history of how we got where we are today.

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"He started by destroying the unions that supported high wages and benefits. A third of us were unionized when Reagan came into office; now it's in single-digits and Trump just de-unionized an additional few-hundred-thousand federal workers.

Then he instituted the first long-lasting freeze on the minimum wage (9 years), cut the top income tax rate from 74% to 27%, "reformed" Social Security by raising the retirement age to 67 and taxing its benefits as income, ended enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine (1987), gutted federal support for colleges, and threw small local businesses to the wolves by abandoning enforcement of 100 years of anti-monopoly laws and securities regulations that forbade stock buy-backs."

Here's the 7 min video version from Thomm