America's Inequality Machine Is Sending the Dow Soaring

"The story of our time is polarization -- by party, by class and by income," said Mark Spindel, founder and chief investment officer at Potomac River Capital in Washington, and co-author of a 2017 book about the Federal Reserve. "I don't see anything in the tax bill to make that any better.''

The Fed's post-2008 toolkit included massive purchases of financial assets, which supported a liftoff on the markets but took time to trickle through to the real economy. Trump's tax critics say his plan will have a similar effect, because companies will spend the windfall on share buybacks or dividends, instead of job-creating investments. Plenty of executives say that's exactly what they'll do.

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Buybacks have fueled the stock rally (there's disagreement about how big a part they played). And the rally's biggest benefits go to the richest. On Twitter last week, Trump invited his followers to check their swelling retirement accounts. Only about half the country's households have any such nest-egg.

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Looming in the background [of the late-90s broad-based economic growth] was a technology-stocks bubble. It burst in March 2000, plunging the economy into recession. What happened next is telling -- it illustrates the perverse asymmetry of bubbles. In the following three years, those poorest households saw their incomes fall more than twice as much as their richest counterparts.

The pattern was repeated after the even bigger housing crash of late 2007. Today, even after an increase of more than 9 percent over two years, incomes at the bottom are short of pre-crisis peaks, while higher earners have comfortably surpassed them.

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American workers won't put up with any more business cycles that yield them few gains, [illiam Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO] says. "This is the last time they can get away with it, because the backlash is going to be huge."