Krugman on the Decade Just Ending

In his NY Times op-ed Paul Krugman sums up the decade just ending...

But from an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.

For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America’s business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.

...

Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.

So let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the Big Zero — the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing. Will the next decade be better? Stay tuned. Oh, and happy New Year.

There's more in the op-ed, but the above is the key bit about how disasterous the decade has been.

What I find appalling is that a disgruntled electorate is even considering voting back in the idiots who created this disaster, the Republicans. There are enough Democrats who were 'fellow travellers' with the supply side economics, the voodoo economics, the deregulatory frenzy of the Republicans. They should quit politics and put on sackcloth and ashes to amend for their mistakes. But the idiot Republicans won't even admit they led American off a cliff. They want to pretend that it is 'socialist Obama' who caused all the problems. This is 'newspeak' as outrageous as the version that George Orwell wrote about in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The last decade has been a disaster for the bottom 90% of the US population. If the electorate in 2010 gives powers back to the Republicans, then this will be a cruel joke on the American population.