Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan pointed out that they would have been happy to run on the same 1932 Democratic Party platform on which Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his successful run for the presidency.

Where Goldwater and Reagan missed was that they failed to carry the sequence forward in the evolving circumstances with the only candidate in U.S. history to win four presidential elections.

FDR proved himself to be an effective pragmatist and therein lay the success of the program he christened a “New Deal for the American people” at his party’s Chicago convention. Once that he took office Roosevelt proved flexible and America benefited as new programs were initiated and the trademark economic concept of the party’s platform was scrapped by the new man in office.

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During the Great Depression, following the stock market crash of 1929, the American public sought a scapegoat for their economic plight. Some held President Hoover responsible, others targeted the three B's -- brokers, bankers, and businessmen. In reality, it could not be attributed to one individual or even a group of people. The roots of the Great Depression were in the very structure of the American economy itself.

America's Economic Flaw: Unless the US economy expands and inflates no less than three percent per year on average, it will enter a "gravity well" that is very difficult to reverse. Factors like debt obligations and asset displacement or depletion (think real estate) intensify the risk. It's built into our brand of Capitalism.

The Wealth Gap: Unlike the Economic Flaw, which is built in to foundation of our economy, the Wealth Gap is determined by the political ideology of the Right or the Left, when it gains the power to enact economic laws. The Wealth Gap is a reliable predictor of massive economic cycles that trigger collapse.

Let's see how this works:

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