The USA economy is experiencing stagflation. I don't know on what basis you are assuming people do not want to increase their income. Such would be a monumental claim one that shakes the very foundations on which most economic and captitalist theories are founded.

Personally as an outsider I can say that it appears the people in the USA without money have it pretty hard compared to other developed nations. I'll go as far as to say that the USA has produced a portion of citizens with a high standard of living unheard of in history that they live basically by taking advantage of people without money, and it is isn't right.

The 'lazy' people, the greedy and wasteful people are tending to be to an outsider such as myself, and many of my peers to be the wealthy. The poor of America being lazy or unmotivated sounds rather ridiculous and highly irrational.

The infrastructure of a society is build by the labour of the people in that society and their skills allow better infrastructure to be built.

Captial.. is a mere side effects, have all the money in the world without the technology and the skilled labour nothing is getting built.

Most of our major infrastructe projects in Australia are contracted out and payed for by the government. The businesses hire people to do the work and become rich off of it. The investors are making money out if and that is just the way it needs to be done.. money needs to be given to people so that they can do a job.. and someone needs to hand out that money, unfortunately as markets are far from efficient that person handing out the money (contractor) gets the most of the gain.

Money isn't really the creator of value it is the means of distributing the gains achieved from that value to be exchanged for different types of value. As a consequence this has allowed rather worthless individuals to sit on and hold for themselves large amounts lf value, which is what I think a lot of us are objecting too.
Like the landed aristocracy of days gone by. Wealth .. long term and extreme wealth in my view is nothing but a market inefficiency.

10 million dollars does not make a skilled engineer or a brick layer... skills make those people what they are an allow them to build what they do.

Take away money and you pay them with land and slaves.. food the job gets done.

An engineer earning6 figures... saving for a few generations even does not come close to clocking up the amount of money seen by some people in our economies, its just wrong.. competition should drive down those profits but its not because competition is being destroyed by unfair practices. Such as tax breaks for the rich and unaffordable schooling all barriers to entry.

By all means : insentive to be educated, to invest but what I see in a system that keeps the embedded elite, elite and makes it progressively harder for a lower class member to rise up. Too many trips and tricks along the way that it makes it if you're born in the top so much easier to stay there. Education is a big one.. almost a shameless nepotic system these days. Taxation breaks for the wealthy.. not at all needed given the massive profits.

Plenty of insentive right there for people to want to rise up.. but we don't want that we want entrenchment and further prosperity for the elites. As long as EVERYONE is taxed at the same rate considering their income why does it matter ? Won't the poor if they work hard one day be rich and pay then their share of taxes ?

Not like everyone is stuck in the same place forever, or, are we ?