First, if gains didn't go to business, there would be no incentive to even have a business. That's why employers don't pay you what you're worth, they pay you a bit less than what you're worth, so they can still make a profit. Also, the less they pay their employees, the less they can sell to their consumers. What they pay has to be a living wage for their own benefit.
Ever expanding businesses make more as time goes on. Go figure.
It's cute how you're ignoring Jimmy Carter running the economy into a ditch, and blaming it on Ronald Reagan.
There's a saying I like to point out to the left, because they ignore it. The rich continue to do what it was that made them rich, the poor do what it was that made them poor. If said poor have kids, more often than not, they do the same as what their parents did.
While you live in America, it's your job to succeed. Americans have been creating and growing their own businesses since the founding of this nation, they came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and sometimes even less than that. No, the American dream isn't gone, the drive to succeed is gone. People expect someone else to succeed for them, and then demand that person's money that he earned themselves.
Hey, can't fix stupid, especially when coupled with lazy. They're victims only of their own stupidity and laziness. Most people, today, want to live a meaningless life and die a meaningless death, while during the founding of this nation, and for a VERY long time after, people dreamed big and did everything in their power to fulfill that dream. With the help of Liberal whackjobs that have basically served them everything on a platter, by taking money from the successful in the nation, and giving it to the laziest people, giving them food stamps, unemployment benefits, welfare, and then instilling heavy doses of wealth envy, trying to convince them that the successful are somehow evil inherently. Want people to succeed? Maybe the Democrats should stop convincing them that it's evil to do so, and then handing them everything in life.