I have a
column up at The Daily Caller examining the current stagnation of the US economy:
In the life of almost all civilizations, a time comes where, as Yeats
put it, “things fall apart.” The internal principles and assumptions
that used to seem to work begin to break down. If the engines of growth
have not ground to a halt, they certainly could use some fresh oil:
stagnation replaces new opportunities. Everything that used to work
suddenly doesn’t. What would have been an easy projection of power
settles into a stalemate.
The United States has long been used to a steady pace of growth. A
vibrant economy created more opportunities for Americans of all walks of
life; the rising tide of growth really did lift all boats. This
economic growth gave hope both to the nation as a whole and to distinct
individuals. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis,
real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) grew at an average annual rate
of about 3.5% between January 1947 and January 2001. This rate of growth
allowed for a doubling of the economy every 17-20 years.
Recent history tells a very different story, however. According to
the BEA, between January 2001 and January 2012 the economy grew at an
average annual rate of just 1.6%, less than half the average annual
growth rate of the second half of the twentieth century. Nor can we
entirely blame this stagnation on President Obama or even the Great
Recession. During President George W. Bush’s presidency, from January
2001 to January 2009, annual GDP growth averaged 1.4%. Even during the
period of growth between 2001 and 2007, annual GDP growth was just 2.7%.
The supposed boom times in the past decade have lagged behind the
average growth of the past; only about one year of the Bush presidency
saw GDP growth greater than the average of the past. The Great Recession
has only underlined the lost economic ground: as of April 2012, real
GDP had only increased by about 2% since the economic peak of mid-2007.
The U.S. economy has barely grown at all since 2007; that’s almost five
years of average economic growth well under 1%.
Read the rest
here. Our current troubles really go back more than four years, and, in order to face them, we might need to find some new solutions or at least revise some old ones.
As I've
suggested elsewhere, the restoration of the US's economic architecture in its broadest sense will likely be a crucial enterprise.
