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In their book “Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700,” economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson flip the script on our understanding of what is portrayed as the substantial economic progress made by the mass of Americans living under capitalism, the system that our media repeatedly shills as the best ever invented.

(snip)

They further found that economic edge was lost during the Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Depression. While it rebounded some after each of those downturns, “income inequality among Americans rose steeply in two great waves — from 1774 to 1860 and from the 1970s to today — rising more than in any other wealthy nation in the world.”

(snip)

This is a dire situation, part of a great unraveling that continues under Trump and manifests itself in both our current opioid crisis and epidemic rates of suicide. Thanks to those, the United States has posted the third annual decline in our life expectancy, something that hasn’t happened since World War I.

This national decline that particularly hit the Rust Belt — the region that put Donald Trump in the White House — has been facilitated by a betrayal of the public interest by our elected leaders of both parties, who sold the country out to multinational corporations.

(snip)

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/07/our-history-of-inequality-america-needs-a-second-revolution/