The Scandal of Money

From the Prologue...

Will conservatives win the coming economic debate? The nation depends on it. We deserve to win, after all. We have the best economic ideas, so we say, aligned with constitutional liberty and the American Dream. The economy is in trouble, and after two terms of President Barack Obama the Democrats are mostly to blame.

After a crash like the 2008 financial debacle, the U.S. economy typically takes off on a seven-year boom. “Seven fat years” was the harvest of President Ronald Reagan, who entered office in the face of Cold War setbacks and sky-high interest rates, inflation, “malaise,” unemployment, and poverty.1 Pursuing similar policies in faint rhetorical disguise and correcting Reagan's second-term hike in capital gains tax rates, Bill Clinton delivered a seven-year echo boom of his own.

The Democrats now must answer the question: Why have Americans suffered seven years (and counting) of a famine of growth--the slowest recovery from recession in a hundred years? Why are jobs increasing more slowly than the job force is shrinking, with lower growth in wages and larger gaps in income and wealth than we have seen since the Great Depression? Why are productivity growth numbers at sixty-five-year lows, down to less than a quarter of the postwar average, and business starts actually in decline?