Jon Hilsenrath and Bob Davis kick off a series at the Wall Street Journal, of all places, on the premise that the US economy is broken and is the cause of the populist uprising that has started:
The economic stability and robust growth the U.S. enjoyed in the previous decade proved to be in its final throes. After 2000, the economy would experience two recessions, a technology-bubble collapse followed by a housing boom, then the largest financial crisis in 75 years and a prolonged period of weak growth.
The past decade and a half has proved so turbulent and disappointing it has upended basic assumptions about modern economics and our political system. This string of disappointments has resulted in one of the most unpredictable and unconventional political seasons in modern history, with the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Median household income, accounting for inflation, has dropped 7% since 2000, and the income gap widened between the wealthy and everyone else. Even though official measures of unemployment have receded from postrecession peaks, seven in 10 Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found.
The 2016 election is shaping up in large part as a referendum on an economic model that is widely seen as failing. Messrs. Trump and Sanders argue that policies celebrated 16 years ago no longer work for most Americans, a message that is resonating widely among those who have most suffered the consequences. Mr. Trump confounded expectations to win his party’s presumptive nomination. Mr. Sanders, though losing his, will take his message to the convention and has yanked his party to the left.
Will they lay this breakage at the feet of the GOP? The failures of the Bush era? The lack of regulation leading to the Great Recession? Political stalemate because of intransigence in the GOP.
We’ll see.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/147094671762
