Let’s put blame where it belongs.
Just about any way you look at it, the country got smacked around from January 2001 to January 2009. Aside from its wretched foreign policy, violations of human rights and civil liberties, nowhere did the Bush administration pound us harder than on the economy. Despite this, the Republican Party’s megaphones at Foxaganda and scattered throughout much of the rest of media are now eagerly telling Americans our future prosperity depends on another round of the clever governance that got us where we are.
To illustrate just how disastrous the GOP’s last turn at the wheel was, The Economist recently highlighted figures from Christopher Wood, a strategist at the Hong Kong-based investment group CLSA:
Click for larger graphic.Real GDP in America grew by an average of 1.9% a year during the 2000s. This may not sound all that terrible, especially for a decade that saw one short recession and another particularly deep and long one. But it is the economy’s worst performance for a long time. During the previous six decades, average growth was 3.9% a year. Only the 1930s—when growth was a mere 0.9% a year—were worse. And America’s population is growing smartly, so GDP per head has grown a good deal more sluggishly than GDP as a whole. The story is much the same when the growth in Americans’ personal consumption during the ten years to the end of 2009 is compared with previous decades. Again, only the 1930s were worse.
In terms of employment growth, the 2000s were also a lost decade. In the years between 1940 and 1999 the number of Americans employed outside farming grew by an average of 27% each decade. In the one just past it fell by 0.8%. In January this year, the number of people who had been jobless for more than six months reached 6.3m. And though the economy has grown for each of the past two quarters, the unemployment rate has only just begun to inch downwards. Though the recession is now supposedly at an end, the pain of the noughties’ miserable economic performance will be felt for a long time to come.
It’s true that the deregulatory fever which got its first big boost from the Reagan administration culminated with some awful actions in the late ’90s, stuff like the deep-sixing of the Glass-Steagall Act that Republicans pushed but which the White House might have vetoed had it not been for the likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers saying what a good idea repealing that New Deal era protection was. An overeager expansion of unfettered free trade and the dot.com bubble also took their toll. Nonetheless, that earlier decade ended with the federal budget in a modest surplus and a record 23 million jobs generated.
The Republicans have a solution for the economic mess we’re in: Bring back the ’00s. No better slogan than one ending in zeroes could be found for the Party of No.
