The Bush Decade

Time's verdict on the `00s, in a story from November:

At exactly two minutes after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan. Government officials and computer scientists around the globe held their breath. Was this the beginning of a massive Y2K computer meltdown? Actually, no. It was an isolated event, one of a handful of glitches to occur (including the failure of 500 slot machines at two racetracks in Delaware) as the sun rose on the new decade. The dreaded millennial meltdown never happened.

Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We're still weeks away from the end of '09, but it's not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over.

I thought the 1970s sucked pretty bad, but that was a golden decade compared to the one wrought largely by George W. Bush, a decade where the Republican doctrine of "hooray for the rich and fuck everyone else" was on full display. Time's story goes on:

For the average working stiff, it was a pretty lousy 10 years. The median household income in 2000 was $52,500. Last year (the most recent year available) it was $50,303. And given that the unemployment rate has climbed to 10.2%, income will almost certainly drop again this year. Low-income Americans fared even worse. In 2000, 11.3% of Americans were living below the poverty line. By 2008, that number had risen to 13.2%. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans without health insurance increased from 13.7% to 15.4%

Bu you can bet your ass that the Republicans think that this decade was just peachy, if you disregard the collapse of the economy, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the functional collapse of our government. Since the decade was a good one for the rich, the heart and soul of the GOP, they may have a point. But for those of us who make less than one of Bush's peeps, it was a pretty tough decade.

(H/T)