The lost decade

In hindsight, I suspect, the most damning judgment on the politics of the 2000s will be that our leaders (well, many of them, at least) misjudged how long they had before the fiscal crunch arrived. It was understood, throughout the decade, that once the baby boomers retired there would have to be an era of belt-tightening and fiscal retrenchment — but that moment still seemed a long (or at least a medium) way off, and the problem of the entitlement system’s sustainability seemed like it could wait for the late 2010s or early 2020s. Many of George W. Bush’s more costly initiatives were based, in part, on this mistaken premise, and so was the ambitious liberalism that rejected Bill Clinton’s centrist micro-politics, derailed Bush’s only major attempt to reform entitlements, and dreamed big dreams about a progressive realignment. It’s easy to forget that when Barack Obama began his campaign for president, the deficit was temporarily on the way down, and it was possible to imagine funding a new era of activist government just by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts and pulling out of Iraq. The gap between revenues and liabilities would need to be closed eventually, but that was a problem for the future …