For the sake of posterity, here’s the Washington Post’s New Year’s Day killer “Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers,” by Neil Irwin. The two most brutal paragraphs:

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 — and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And a brutal description of what in tarnation was going on in the aughts economy:

But beyond these dramatic ups and downs lies an even more sobering reality: long-term economic stagnation. The trillions of dollars that poured into housing investment and consumer spending in the first part of the decade distorted economic activity.

Capital was funneled to build mini-mansions in Sun Belt suburbs, many of which now sit empty, rather than toward industrial machines or other business investment that might generate economic output and jobs for years to come.

At the risk of being trite, the piece illustrates how unhelpful it is to focus on jobs and economic growth with Jan. 20, 2009 as a starting point. This isn’t  just a Democratic Party talking point: Barack Obama really did inherit a fundamentally unsound economy and a decade’s worth of rising unemployment and inequality. Voters will have to judge the economic record of Congress in a few months and Obama in a couple of years. However, the fairest judgments will be rendered years in the future: What did Washington do in 2010 to reverse a decade of misery?

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