I'd say that your ideas about economics are seriously flawed, but you already know that I see it that way.

What you're missing here is the counterintuitive relationship between the degree to which an economic system is bounded, and the degree to which it's a zero sum game.

When you use the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats", what you mean is that in a closed economic system, increasing economic activity expands the closed system, because it has nowhere else to go; it literally inflates, and benefits are spread evenly throughout the metaphorical gas that's expanding.

America for a long time had an essentially closed economic system. Primary economic activity such as manufacturing and engineering took place within our borders, and what crossed the borders was only the finished products and money to pay for them.

But today our economic system is no longer closed; or perhaps it's more accurate to say that suddenly we've become one component in a much larger system. Now it's not just finished goods that cross the membrane, the work itself can cross the membrane. Jobs can "go overseas" as employers play labor pools off against one another, looking for a better deal for themselves. No denying that it provides a temporary improvement for the population favored by employers, but it really is only temporary. In India, ironically enough, the larger outsourcing firms are themselves beginning to outsource labor to lowercost pools in places like China and Southeast Asia.

The overall effect is to negate the "rising tide lifts all boats" chestnut, in favor of an "optimization strategy" by employers that diffuses prosperity and provides less benefits to workers in general. And they get to keep more of the profit, which is the point of the exercize. It's not a random accident that while productivity in America has continued to rise, wages have nowhere near kept pace. The extra wealth produced is not going to the people who directly produced it.

I think I have the perfect name for you conception of economics: Newtonian Economics. Very simple, very direct, very mechanistic, and compared to the real universe, tragically limited.