Robert Parry: Lessons from America's Lost Decade

As the United States takes the measure of Barack Obama's first year in the White House and looks beyond to what could be a difficult new decade, 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.

By comparison, the 1970s, which are often bemoaned as a time of economic stagflation and political malaise, registered a 27 percent increase in jobs. Yet, in part because of that relatively slow rise in jobs – down from 31 percent in the 1960s – American voters turned to Ronald Reagan and his radical economic theories of tax cuts, global "free markets" and deregulation.

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. The percentage job increase for the 1990s stayed at 20 percent, although job growth did pick up later in the decade under Democrat Bill Clinton, who raised taxes and moderated some of Reagan's approaches while still pushing "free trade" agreements and deregulation.

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....

Though the downward economic spiral can be traced over the past three decades, the facts are especially stark for the 2000s, the so-called "Aughts" or perhaps more accurately the "Naughts."

Indeed, across the news media, it is hard to find any serious – or sustained – criticism of the Reagan/Bush economic theories. Far more blame is heaped on Obama for not having fully turned around the financial and economic crisis that he inherited....

More generally, few Americans appear to be paying any heed to the lessons of the past three decades. Instead, many are simply reprising the same mistakes.

Republicans and the Right are determined to protect the Reagan-Bush legacies by blocking Democratic domestic legislation that might take the country in a different direction. To stop that possibility, they continue to whip up anti-tax, anti-government furies.

Meanwhile, the Democrats still come across as flaccid protectors of an Establishment that many Americans understandably hate. And the American Left mostly sits in the bleachers booing all the players, rather than getting into the game....

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.