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The USA has decided 3 times to create a middle class. By enacting massive transfers of wealth. Most recently the New Deal.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips http://a.co/d/glFxd7G

That the rich get richer is just math. Without deliberate wealth redistribution, growing inequity is inevitable.

Gross inequity and democracy are incompatible. A democratic society must balance capitalism and socialism to survive.

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The USA has always had a middle class. It never decided to create it, it just naturally happens in a free market.

Is the middle class currently growing, shrinking, or neither?

It's shrinking by your definition, growing by others (the poor of today are the middle class of history if you look at poverty levels, purchasing power, or class mobility).

Further, we are in a noticeable amount of ways not a free market. If I took my car engine (the free market) to a mechanic and said "It's not working after I just made a couple of random small changes to it", the mechanic would rightfully laugh me out the door because me just meddling with a complex system, even if its only a small amount, can have disastrous side effects.

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