Navarro is the guy the arrows are pointing to. Reuters The Trump administration's timeline on the decline of American workers starts in the late 1990s with the rise of China.

That thinking overlooks the impact of spending cuts, deregulation, and a shift to shareholder primacy at the expense of investment in innovation and workers.

That began in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was president and led a push for more Laissez Faire economics.

Ignoring the US's hand in the demise of its own working class means this administration will never actually find ways to grow the economy for them.

White House Trade Council head Peter Navarro was explaining what he sees as the biggest problem with the American economy since the 1990s that exacerbated inequality and left the American worker in the lurch.

"Well, I think you start with the idea that we've had 15 years of subpar growth — 2 percent or below," he said in an interview with NPR to promote "Made in America Week."

"Prior to 2001, we grew at 3 and a half percent. The big difference has been the entry of China in particular into the World Trade Organization and our markets. And we've just been hammered. What that does as a proxy, basically, is it drains essentially the lifeblood out of our manufacturing economy, out of our communities, out of our tax bases."

So the narrative from the White House is that China's big push into global markets is the root cause for stagnant economic and wage growth since the turn of the millennium. But that narrative has a really basic flaw: It's only half the story. And with only half the story, you're not going to find a whole solution to the slow growth, low wage, low unemployment predicament we find ourselves in now.

The problem didn't start in the 1990s, it started in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan — a hero of the Trump administration — was president, and neoliberal economics were first making their mark on policy. Reagan and his ilk distrusted government and believed that the private sector could make the best decisions when left on its own. You've heard about this — it's called laissez faire economics.

This ideology ultimately led to the financialization of the US corporation — the process of putting shareholders first, often at the expense of workers and consumers — and its emergence as an actor that takes resources from the economy rather than creating them. This, combined with a government zeal for lowering taxes rather than spending, means no one — not the government, and not the private sector — is investing enough in America to keep the economy strong across social classes.

In short: Government cuts and changes in how corporations operate mean American workers are getting screwed by their own government and their own employers.

Navarro and I end up with the same dire view of the current economic landscape. We just disagree on how we got there.

An unstoppable force...

But I'm jumping ahead — let's go back to the Reagan era. That was also the time Japanese manufacturers had developed a superior management style to their American rivals and, frankly, started eating our lunch.

Instead of keeping a wall between management and workers, Japanese manufacturers adopted “organizational integration,” which put technical specialists and shop-floor workers together. The result was better products made faster in Japan, and jobs lost permanently in the United States.

The Financialization of the US Corporation, William Lazonick William Lazonick, an economics professor at UMass Lowell,

describes the results of that transformation in his 2012 paper, "The Financialization of the US Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How Can It Be Regained." It's a must-read for this kind of stuff.

Lazonick describes the huge negative effect competition from Japanese manufacturers had on American manufacturing jobs: