Outside of the top 1% extremely wealthy, few have much disposable income, there are few good-paying jobs for the working class, partly because of outsourcing abroad, increasing robotization, unimaginative, old-style business thinking, etc. Moreover, violence and threats of violence have increased in our class-based inequality system.
It's the most simple Keynesian prescription: If most people have little money to spend, the economy will remain locked in its present state of torpor. If they have some extra cash, they will spend it, thus greasing the wheels of economic activity.
In an ideal world in this scenario, the economy would bounce back into a robust recovery, jobs would be plentiful, and all those paychecks would bolster a lively and politically stable economic scene. But there is little hope that scenario can take place. All over the world, the battle is raging between the "austerians" -- those "austerity" advocates who want to tighten down the screws on the economy, which negatively impacts mostly the poor and middle-class -- and those who prefer the more Keynesian, grow-out-of-the-recession approach through infrastructure investment, an increase in targeted fees and taxes, aiding progressive entrepreneurial ventures with tax incentives, etc.
In much of the developed industrial world, mainly in the U.S. and Europe, austerity reigns, and the ones benefitting are those at the top of the economic ladder. Much of the conservative rightwing excoriates the poorer classes as "moochers" and "takers," but it's quite clear that the true "takers" are the "one-percenters" who get more and more wealthy on the backs of those beneath them.
GETTING MONEY INTO CIRCULATION
Rightwing "trickle-down" theories are little more than heartless Republican spin on what is, at its core, a socio-political fraud. Far better that the government arrange to get disposable funds into the hands of those who have little such largesse.
In other words, straightforward Keynesian macro-economics, proven time and again by history, as opposed to austerity (cut government and taxes and screw the poor), which history has clearly refuted. In fact, forget history: look at the economies abroad today, where the Keynesian solution is promoting recovery (in Iceland, parts of continental Europe, the Pacific Rim), and where usterity, once again, is failing (in the UK, Greece, Spain).
I am not a trained economist; my degrees are in American politics and international relations. But even ordinary observers can figure out that remaining in our current status quo is a risky, and losing, proposition.
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