America, like Japan, Denmark and other former capitalist flagships, took a serious turn toward overregulation, overtaxation and socialism since the 1990s.
And American economic growth has stagnated. 8 years into a supposed “recovery,” U.S. GDP growth rates still hover around 2 percent annually or less.
According to George Will, “If 2 percent growth is, as he says, “the most likely scenario” for the foreseeable future, the nation faces a second consecutive lost decade — one without a year of 3 percent growth.”
N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economist and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, writes in the New York Times that in the past decade the growth rate of the real gross domestic product per person averaged 0.44 percent, down from the historical norm of 2 percent: At 2 percent, incomes double every 35 years; at 0.44 percent, about every 160 years.
