For a brief moment (roughly from the end of World War II through the early '70s) an economic consensus held sway (or appeared to) in the United States. Working- and middle-class Americans would receive an equitable portion of the country's wealth. This -- in the post-New Deal era -- was a historical anomaly.
Everyone thrived, but the rich not quite so much as before FDR. Corporate titans wanted the bigger share that economic elites had long been accustomed to getting. Their plot to regain dominance is memorialized in the Powell memo (August 1971). Although the economic transformation was underway by the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan's victory is an apt demarcation of the new era -- which we live in to this day.
Kevin Drum's chart is a telling illustration of what we've experienced since the Reagan revolution.
