Get ready for a lost decade

Our point here is that the bad policy vicious circle probably has a long way to run. While it’s still possible to entertain wild hopes about an Obama administration, such hopes are partly self-liquidating on closer inspection — they exist in the first place only because Mr. Obama has given us so little to go on, except campaign boilerplate.

Bottom line: Politics is in charge — in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.