The concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if you're Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you're considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that's enormously productive. So we're talking in a tautology. We're talking with circular reasoning here.

We're still in the collapse that began after 2008. There's not a new collapse, there hasn't been a recovery.

There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent.

From 2008 to 2016 all the growth in the American economy, all the growth in national income, was earned just by the wealthiest 5% of the population. So they got all the growth. 95% of the population didn't grow. If you can get a flat tax or other lower tax, as Trump is suggesting, then this richest 5% will be able to keep even more money. That means that the 95% will be even poorer than they were before, relative to the very top.

If you increase living standards, you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.

Elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called "unproductive activity."

Economists often define their discipline as "the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends." But when resources or money really become scarce, economists call it a crisis and say that it's a question for politicians, not their own department.