Don’t let the happy ending fool you. Economically, the 2010s were a wasted decade.
that the administration’s plan was “unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.” But inside the White House, people were worried that a larger plan wouldn’t be able to squeak through Congress, and that anything approaching the symbolically important $1 trillion mark would be dead on arrival.
The politicos might have been right about not being able to do it. Democrats on Capitol Hill were skittish at the unprecedented numbers, the bill required moderate Republican votes to overcome a filibuster, and Rush Limbaugh—who for a while people were seriously calling the de facto head of the GOP—against the “porkulus.” Perhaps $787 billion was the most that could ever have been done. That merely means that our government, collectively, couldn’t rise to the moment.
The undersized stimulus bill, however, was not nearly so damaging as the government’s hard turn toward austerity following the Tea Party wave in 2010. The new class of arch-conservative Republicans arrived in Washington demanding steep budget cuts and threatened to take the country’s debt ceiling hostage in order to achieve them. And they succeeded. The Manhattan Institute has calculated thatworth of spending cuts over the last six years of Obama’s term.
Given the party’s willingness to ignore deficits during the Bush and Trump administrations and in some cases embrace the very Keynesian ideas they once mocked—see:But bad-faith politicking isn’t the only thing that makes Washington’s midrecovery turn to austerity so galling. It’s the way mainstream moderates and media figures abetted it by treating the national debt as an urgent crisis in the middle of what was effectively a depression.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Australia's Lyon against 'ridiculous' four-day test conceptAustralia off-spinner Nathan Lyon says he is totally against the idea of tinkeri...
Read more »
Six suspects arrested in mass shooting that left four dead in FresnoSix weeks after four men were killed in a mass shooting at a home in southeast Fresno, the Police Department has made arrests.
Read more »
The Biggest Music Business Stories of the DecadeThe last ten years have been among the music industry’s most celebratory, and at the same time, the decade has introduced seismic shifts in consumption, culture and technology. Only the stron…
Read more »
This Decade's Home Trends We Once Loved—but Want to Leave BehindThe best and worst home trends of the 2010s, according to you.
Read more »
The 2010s Was the Decade of Bad Men. Will the 2020s Be Better?With toxic masculinity now part of the zeitgeist, a new crop of books aims to help define manhood in the new decade
Read more »