The servant economy : where America's elite is sending the middle class / Jeff Faux.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-284) and index.

Part I: The Pursuit of Folly -- 1. The Politics of Hope -- 2. A Brief History of America's Cushion -- 3. The Cushion Deflates -- 4. The Age of Reagan: American Abandoned -- Part II: What the Crash Revealed About the Future of the Middle Class -- 5. Who Knew? They Knew. -- 6. Obama: The Same Pile of Sand -- 7. The Shaky Case for Optimism -- Part III: When What We See Coming, Comes -- 8. The Politics of Austerity -- 9. Grand Bargain? A Done Deal. -- 10. Flickering Hope: Schools, Trade Winds, and the Bubble's Return -- 11. The Servant Economy -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Economist Jeff Faux explains why neither party's leaders have a plan to remedy America's unemployment, inequality, or long economic slide. America's political and economic elite spent so long making such terrible decisions that they caused the collapse of 2008. It was an accident of history, that after World War II the U.S. could afford a prosperous middle class, a dominant military, and a booming economic elite at the same time. For the past three decades, all three have been competing, with the middle class always losing. Faux explores a future economy nearly devoid of production and exports, with the most profitable industries existing to solely to serve the wealthiest 1%.