‘The Aughts’: The worst decade ever?

Will "the decade from hell" still feel that way 10 years from now?

“Good riddance to the Zeros!” said Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The decade from hell,” as it has been aptly dubbed, brought us the horrific 9/11 attacks, the anthrax scare, Hurricane Katrina and its scandalously tragic aftermath, the stock market collapse, and two protracted and painful wars—all capped off with a debilitating, two-year recession and 10 percent unemployment. “It was easily one of the worst periods in recent American history, upwards of 3,600 days drenched in fear and bitter divisiveness.” The biggest losers were average American families, said Neil Irwin in The Washington Post. Middle-income households were earning less at the decade’s end, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999—the first decline in income over a decade since World War II. After decades of double-digit job growth, “the Aughts” saw zero net job creation. For American workers, this was “a lost decade.”

It wasn’t only millions of jobs that were lost, said Marc Cooper in the Los Angeles Times. We also lost “our guiding principles as a nation.” After the twin towers fell, “we were stampeded” into an unnecessary war “by an administration that cynically manipulated our deepest but unfounded fears.” Executive power was expanded in a manner that would make “Dick Nixon blush and Thomas Jefferson roll over in his grave,” and our global standing “was drowned in the CIA’s waterboard torture pits and in the horror dungeons of Abu Ghraib.” And let’s not forget how it all began—with the “charade” of an unelected, blatantly partisan Supreme Court picking our president.

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