The Lost Decade

Many people are wondering if, as a result of the financial crisis, America will suffer a "Lost Decade" similar to that suffered by Japan in the 1990s.

If so, it would be our second in a row:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress...

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father...

[E]conomists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation's economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an "ownership society," have proved unsustainable...

Even excluding the 2008 recession, however, Bush presided over a weak period for the U.S. economy. For example, for the first seven years of the Bush administration, gross domestic product grew at a paltry 2.1 percent annual rate.

The article doesn't mention it, but even before the recent crash, U.S. stocks had been flat over Bush's term - a worse performance than under Jimmy Carter, or any president since WW2, for that matter.

Why did we have this Lost Decade? Weren't Republicans supposed to be the Party of Business? Then why were bubble-driven financial companies the only ones making money? Who exactly have Republicans been good for?

The answer, horribly, may turn out to be that Republicans didn't even care about part of the electorate. They weren't interested in redistributing money to the rich, or to the business class; they were interested in redistributing money to their personal friends. They burned the furniture, they raided the cabinet, they trashed the hotel room, and they got out while the getting was good. What a despicable bunch of gangsters.

And we voted for them, three times in a row. Maybe we deserve another lost decade.