The truth behind Occupy's rallying cry, "We are the 99%," was hard to forget, even for the people in both parties who dismissed the protesters as nothing more than naive college kids and envious poor people. From that point on, it was hard to ignore the data-backed fact that the gap between the top 1% of Americans and everyone else was larger than it had been since pre-Depression levels in the 1920s.
And as the decade progressed, researchers like the French economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman dug in and found that it was worse than expected. As they published in their 2018 World Inequality Report, the top 1% of American adults captured 20.2% of US national income in 2016, and the bottom 50% captured 12.5%. In 1980, the top 1% captured 11% of the national income, and the bottom 50% captured just over 20%.
Today, unemployment is at historically low levels, but wage growth has been painfully sluggish.
And so that means that even when the economy seems to be doing well, millions of Americans are still struggling. We're essentially in a new Gilded Age, referring to the period in the late 19th century of huge economic growth alongside massive inequality that followed Reconstruction.
Donald Trump addressed this sentiment on his path to the White House in the 2016 election, and his win also empowered a growing progressive wing in the Democratic Party.
At this point, two ideas that were radical 10 years ago, a wealth tax on the assets of the richest Americans and Medicare for All, are pillars of both Sanders and Warrens' presidential platforms.
And while Trump's 2017 tax bill was traditionally conservative and far from populist, it included a policy for "opportunity zones" aimed at addressing inequality in parts of the country that weren't already bustling. Proposed by Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the policy provides developers tax breaks as motivation for building them up. Though they have certainly not been without controversy, they've still received bipartisan support.