[mindslight]

Citizens got left behind because of corrupt government policy that took the gains from cheap imports, centralized them into newly-created money (to make sure inflation still happened), and then dumped most of that new money into cheap loans for the financial industry, driving asset inflation and other financialization. This was the so-called "fiscal responsibility" of the past three+ decades - profligate handouts for the rich.

A sane alternative would have been for the government to spend the surplus on deliberate policy goals such as infrastructure development, preserving the industrial base, scientific research, forward looking renewable energy and less polluting processes, restoring the expectation of full time employment to 40 hours per household, etc. Distorting prices in those sectors in service of deliberate goals would have been much better than making housing unaffordable and calling it progress.