If the U.S economy were run as it were in the 1930's, there would be no stopping America. You need to return to that time and generate a strong middle class. That is one of many reasons America was so dominant and the entire world envied the wealth generating liberty loving nation of America.
Everyone had discretionary income to spend, the government was out of the economy leaving it to free market capitalism, innovation and invention was high and taxes were low.
Here is a graph that shows the destruction of the American Middle Class from 1950's on.
60 Years of American Economic History, Told in 1 Graph
In the 60 years after World War II, the United States built the world's greatest middle class economy, then unbuilt it. And if you want a single snapshot that captures the broad sweep of that transformation, you could do much worse than this graph from a new Pew
report, which tracks how average family incomes have changed at each rung of the economic ladder from 1950 through 2010.
Here's the arc it captures: In the immediate postwar period, America's rapid growth favored the middle and lower classes. The poorest fifth of all households, in fact, fared best. Then, in the 1970s, amid two oil crises and awful inflation, things ground to a halt. The country backed off the postwar, center-left consensus -- captured by Richard Nixon's comment that "we're all Keynesians now" -- and tried Reaganism instead. We cut taxes. Technology and competition from abroad started whittling away at blue collar jobs and pay. The financial markets took off. And so when growth returned, it favored the investment class -- the top 20 percent, and especially the top 5 percent (and, though it's not on this chart, the top 1 percent more than anybody).
