... it might be useful to first stop and extract some lessons from the 2000s, which proved to be a lost economic decade for many Americans.
For the first time since the Great Depression, the United States experienced zero job growth in a decade. Zero. And zero is actually worse than it sounds since none of the preceding six decades registered job growth of less than 20 percent.
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Reagan sold Americans on his core vision: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Through his personal magnetism, Reagan turned taxes into a third rail of American politics. He convinced many voters that the government's only important role was funding the military.
Yet, instead of guiding the country to a bright new day of economic vitality, Reagan's approach accelerated a de-industrialization of the United States and a slump in the growth of American jobs, down to 20 percent during the 1980s.
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Hard-line Reaganomics returned with a vengeance under George W. Bush more tax cuts, more faith in "free trade," more deregulation and the Great American Job Engine finally started grinding to a halt. Zero percent increase.
Despite the painful statistics of the past three decades, Reaganomics remains a powerful force in American political life. Anyone tuning in CNBC or picking up the Wall Street Journal would think that these economic policies had enjoyed unqualified success.
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As the Post article and its accompanying graphics show, the last decade's sad story wasn't just limited to the abysmal job numbers.
U.S. economic output slowed to its worst pace since the 1930s, rising only 17.8 percent in the 2000s, less than half the 38.1 percent increase in the despised 1970s. Household net worth declined 4 percent in the last decade, compared to a 28 percent rise in the 1970s. (All figures were adjusted for inflation.)
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When Reagan took office, the total federal debt was still under $1 trillion ($909 billion). By the end of the 12-year Republican reign of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the total debt had quadrupled.
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By the time Bush left office in 2009, the annual deficit had gone to $1.3 trillion (from a $236 billion surplus). Total federal debt had risen almost $5 trillion to $10.7 trillion. And the projected 10-year budget outlook called for $8 trillion more in red ink.
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As this new decade dawns, the U.S. political process seems resistant to the one of most obvious lessons of the past three decades: Simply put, Reaganomics didn't work. As George H.W. Bush once commented when he was running against Reagan in the 1980 primaries it is "voodoo economics."
Yet, the fact that the United States has embraced "voodoo economics" for 30 years and refuses to recognize the statistical evidence of Reaganomics' abject failure suggests that the larger lesson of this era and especially this past lost decade is that the U.S. political process is dysfunctional.
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