Citizens United gave the corporations WAY more power than it gave to the unions because it allowed for the creation of PAC's. It allows people like George Soros, Sheldon Edelson, the Koch Bros. to spend $50 million on elections, to fund efforts for gerrymandering. The Koch Bros. funded the Tea Party once they saw it's potential to promote their no taxes, no social programs agenda.
If you question their influence, consider this: Since the Citizen's United decision, the House and Senate have been controlled by the Republican Party, even though Repulicans have consistently lost the popular vote in the House. I'm sure right wingers will have no problem with any of this but even the right wing Supreme Court knew it had gone too far.
In theory, it does benefit the unions, except there are far fewer unions than corporations, few of the private sector unions have big piles of cash to donate or to create PAC's. Most corporations, banks, and brokerage firms donate to both parties to hedge their bets, but privately encourage their employees to vote Republican.
I highly doubt the gains made in Congress since Citizens has anything to do with that ruling. IMHO the Democrats stopped listening to pretty much everyone else except the far left and it caught up with them. Passing the unpopular ACA didn't help either. You can blame Citizens if you want too, but correlation does not prove causation.
You're absolutely correct, correlation does not prove causation, and I can think of a number of other factors at play that also factored into the results. After Republicans lost the White House in 2008, they went on an absolute media campaign against the Obama Administration.
Although they seldom appeared on the Sunday morning TV shows while W was President (why set yourself up to have to defend W's policies on network TV?), once Obama was sworn in, they were everywhere on the networks criticizing the President and his attempts to stem the bleeding. Even though Obama held the House and Senate, Republicans were 70% of the guests on the network and public network Sunday morning political broadcasts. That's a LOT of free airtime, which Republicans used very effectively to sell the idea that Obama's policies were the wrong way to go.
In my opinion, you fuck up the economy that bad, you've got a lot of damn gall to criticize the guy whose cleaning up your mess, especially when your solution is more of the cut and spend policies that got us all into this mess in the first place. I don't even want to hear from you until you come back with some new ideas, because this cut taxes and spend shit doesn't work. It didn't work for Reagan (stock market crashed in 1987, 6% unemployment rate), and it sure as hell didn't work under W (world economic meltdown, 2008, 10% unemployment rate).
First of all, let's not presume that because the big recession hit when W was in office that it was all his fault. It wasn't his policies that were responsible or even contributed to that economic catastrophe, certainly not the 2003 tax cuts. He had a recession to deal with in his 1st year too, and then 9/11 hit. Had we not gone to war in response to that (which BTW many Dems supported at the time), maybe his administration would have been more successful economically speaking. Certainly the years from 2003-2007 leading up to the recession were pretty damn good, so maybe those tax cuts were on the whole a positive influence.
As far as Reagan's tax cuts are concerned, the US enjoyed a lengthy period of economic success for 20 some years after they went into effect. To say they didn't work is a load of crap. And then there's Obama, who's record of sub-par economic growth during his 8 years are the worst since WWII. And the only reason it was even that good was because of the boom in fracking, which he opposed. He spent money like it was water but the only people who benefited were the richest people; everyone else barely treaded water.
The Reagan tax cuts appeared to usher in a period of properity but only because the were accompanied by an immediate increase in military spending and a big arms build-up, all funded with borrowed money. When the deficit doubled, unemployment hit 6% and the stock market crashed, Reagan decided that maybe the tax cuts weren't such a good idea, and he raised taxes substantially.
Look at the economic numbers.
- Up uptil 1980, wages kept pace with inflation - afterward 1880 working class wages stagnated
- Up until 1980, the working class had savings. After 1980, those savings started to erode
- Similarly, middle class savings and wages started to erode after 1980
- The transfer of the wealth to the top 5% began in 1980.
The second market crash was much harder on the US economy because of the steady erosion of savings which was the result of 30 years of wage stagnation. People cut back on luxuries, took second jobs. But the working class has exhausted its savings, and maxxed out its credit cards, and has been living paycheck to paycheck for quite some time. The middle class hasn't been thoroughly drained yet, but it's getting far too close.