When income grows, who gains?

The US busted unions and fought organised labor in general since the 1970s, and deregulated industry enormously. Also taxation is at a historic low. Those are the causes of the massive wealth presently accumulating at the top -- wealthy people today are not more meritocratic or harder working than wealthy people from the 1950s. But they're much, much wealthier. The reduction in real wages since the 70s has pushed regular people into debt (in an attempt to live a middle class lifestyle) with all the predictable negative consequences.

This is even terrible from a libertarian point of view. Because a country without a middle class is a country without consumers.

> And by honestly I mean he didn't force people to pay him and he didn't coerce anyone to pay him.

Every economic transaction takes place within the context of coercion, because property rights are themselves coercion. For instance, people who need to work to pay the rent "choose" to work because they will be evicted from their shelter by law enforcement if they do not pay.

Libertarians like to pretend that this sort of force doesn't exist, and only use the term "force" when other people enforce their right to property via taxation. It's totally intellectually dishonest, and I suspect most libertarians are aware of this but continue to use such terminology because it makes it less obvious that they are merely arguing for entrenchment of their own privilege.

Not true. Regular people have most of their wealth in their house and cars. That's if they have net wealth in the first place. (And 401ks and other mutual funds, which is also not cash money).

According to the census bureau households(depending on income or asset quintile) have between $200 and $1800 in their checking account. (http://www.census.gov/people/wealth/)

To fix this you need to remove money makes money.

Examples of money makes money that would need fixing:

To save money (i.e. by insulating your house) you need money

To get a better job, you need time/education, this also requires money up front.

To create a new big profitable company, you need money.

If your a bank you need money (unless your local law doesn't require this) to get money by the interest.

If you wish to get interest of money you need money.

To buy a house, you need money, after a 30 years, you get more money back then you invested.

Then World War II has two more effects: it finally kicks the U.S. economy into gear through massive government spending but maybe more important the rest of the first world (Europe and Japan) has most of it's infrastructure heavily damaged. The only other potential competitor, the Soviet Union, disengages from the capitalist economies of the 1st world and builds it own 2nd world of communist countries. This leads to spectacular growth in 1950s and 1960s for the U.S. and with the New Deal consensus it mostly goes to the working class and the middle class.

In the 1970s, the consensus starts to break down primarily due to two factors: automation and globalization. The rest of the world begins to recover and compete. And because thy haven't had the same sort of growth the U.S. did, their workers are much cheaper. Additional automation begins to create an ever-lowering ceiling on how much a low skill job is worth. Once the machinery to automate a job becomes cheaper than the worker, that worker is out of a job.

In the 1980s, the business owners (who never really like the New Deal) use their newfound leverage to create a coalition with libertarians and social conservatives to essentially dismember the government portion of the New Deal. Once this is done, the pie continues to grow, but the rich have start to grow their portion of it.