> Democrats in office understood the macro picture and worked diligently and intelligently to fix it,

I agree with everything you're saying except this bit. I don't think democrats were working to fix it in any fundamental way. They're too beholden to corporate interests to do anything that overturns that apple cart. They were trying to tweak the program slightly to make it less bad, sure. But that's not a real fix for such a broken capital/labor split.