To first point, I dont remember where I read that study, but it was either in newsweek or portfolio (i'm unsure because its a while since then); anyway, according to that research article about 600 billion dollars are being siphoned away from middle class/poor americans to filthy rich in america; so your argument doesn't make any sense at all.
Look up "private equity investment"
And to Guest's comment, it is bloody true, but problem is americans are digging a pretty big deep S*** hole for themselves, I do not see american economy staying as top dog for long, mostly because life from its real economy is being stiffled out by the socalled 'financial economy' which is nothing but pile of worthless papers, which we all learned the hard way in last couple of years, yet we refuse to learn the lessons. Another dimension to this can be, most empires have their time at top while at peak of their financial and military power, i guess for americans the first of these is behind them now.
America is on its way out for this reason; Americans believe that all you have to do is buy s*** and collect public entitlements to even have an economy. We don't make anything, we don't dig anything up, and we don't grow enough to balance a staggering trade deficit.
I hear a lot of BS as to how we've moved to a "post industrial society", or a "service based economy. Follow my little tale about how money is earned and changes hands in one sector of that illusory "service based economy". Medical care is a service, and nurses are service providers, so then; nurse "A" wipes patient "B's" bum, who has received his medical insurance from public entitlement, he then gets out of the hospital and spends his welfare check on drugs, at which point the money is funneled back into the system with the purchase of subwoofers and rims, many of which were made in China, so from there it's bye, bye imaginary paper. And then the government has to pay (rather owe) China money for someone that they gave the money to in the first place.
Money, no longer on any exchange for precious metal standard, is therefore only of it's value as "currency". But, in order for it to retain any value whatsoever, it therefore must be the "avatar" of commodity. Since no commodity other than drugs was even on the radar in this scenario, and drug exchanges can only be described as "money laundering", the money has no value, it's just paper.
If this were only limited to the small scenario I've described, we wouldn't even have a problem. It starts with our government printing vast quantities of "money" as an "economic stimulus", then giving it to people as if it's real in the first place. At least as much as private equity, politicians, and lobbyists aren't able to funnel off.
The "upside" of this is that the money had no real value in the first place. Since "deficit" is an imaginary "IUO" from the government to itself, who after all just printed it.
I always thought that you couldn't owe for something that didn't exist in the first place.