The only number that really matters
... GDP tells you how much resource-generating capacity you have by looking at how much you are doing right now. ...
And as you know if you read posts here labeled GDP, we aren't doing enough.
GDP today would be DOUBLE what it is if the compound annual growth rate of GDP from the Great Depression to 1984 had simply continued on its trajectory after 1984, but it didn't.
Meanwhile, the steady decline in capacity utilization in the post-war tells you why.
Reagan administration policy prescriptions were only temporarily successful at staving off the trend lower.
Among its biggest mistakes was lowering ordinary income tax rates because those punitive rates had forced the wealthy to invest their money in American productive capacity in order to get preferential long term capital gains tax rewards from those investments.
Instead like FOOLS we gave them low tax bills on ordinary income, and they promptly took the surplus gains and invested them in low labor cost foreign lands.
Middle classes were created abroad in the millions where there were none before, at the expense of ours here in America.
Ronald Reagan wanted us to believe that it's our money and we know best what to do with it.
WE DON'T.
