IMO, our economy works best -- and our middle class that drives the economy is strongest -- when there is a healthy equilibrium between the leverage and "clout" of both labor and capital. Without getting deep into politics, I think it's pretty clear that the economy of the last few years has tipped the scales *vastly* in favor of capital. The last decade has seen the "value" of labor lag horribly compared to top-line economic growth for capital.
(And I lived in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, so I've also seen the balance in favor of labor, where for skilled professionals double digit wage gains were fairly common.)
So to rephrase what I say above, perhaps the big economic challenge facing this nation is to see if we can restore some semblance of balance without creating a system that causes vast amounts of capital to flee (or remain parked in cash) to the detriment of growing our GDP. I don't think the usual talking points can address this, as all they do is either continue to increase the current imbalance or replace one imbalance with another imbalance in the opposite direction.
We have a growing number of folks who feel like they will *never* be able to retire, let alone early, largely because they can't keep up with the cash flow needed to adequately fund it. Wages are flat (at best), *real* inflation felt in essentials like food, energy, education and health care is moderately high, and has been mounting for several years. There's just little left for a lot of folks to save for retirement any more in a lot of cases.
Demonizing capital isn't helpful, and neither is demonizing labor. So can we help the middle class rebound in a way that doesn't encourage mass amounts of capital to "flee" from our domestic economy? Perhaps someone who can crack that one would deserve a Nobel Prize in Economics.
(Also moving this to the Politics thread as a precautionary measure.)