Are you better off now?

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan struck a chord with Americans when he famously asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

To put the decade of the naughties, the aughts or whatever you decide to call it (yes, for those of you with nothing better to do than nitpick columns, I realize that technically the decade began in 2001, not 2000. Honestly, does it matter?) in perspective, perhaps we should ask ourselves the same thing.

Are you better off now than you were ten years ago?

The past ten years marked the first decade on record in which private sector employment actually declined. Job creation on the whole has remained relatively flat.

Median household income has fallen for the first time since the Census Bureau started tracking household income four decades ago. The typical American family earns less now than it did in 1999 once everything is adjusted for inflation.

 Moreover, other measures suggest that even before the Census Bureau documented it, household income hasn’t fallen over the course of a whole decade since the 1930s.

And the stock market has certainly lost ground. On Jan. 14, 2000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit the “Clinton bull” high of 11,723. On Dec. 31, 2009, the Dow closed at 10,428.

Add to all of this two economic crises, Sept. 11, a botched presidential election, Afghanistan, Iraq, Enron, WorldCom, anthrax, D.C. snipers and Katrina, and it’s easy to see that the world we live in today is certainly not better than the world of 2000.

Time magazine labeled it the “Decade from Hell,” writing that “This decade was as awful as any peacetime decade in the nation’s entire history.”

New York Times columnist and Nobel economist Paul Krugman dubbed the decade “The Big Zero,” pointing out that “It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.”

Now I realize that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, but I can’t help but notice that eight-tenths of a decade that consisted of flat-out retrogradation for the majority of Americans were presided over by a single man. The ’00s were led in large part by George W. Bush, and his policies to a great extent are responsible for shaping the decade.

True, many of the atrocities we’ve suffered in recent history were beyond the control of anyone, even the president of the United States.

But the vast majority of simple quality-of-life issues – the things that most shape our daily lives today – can be traced back to Bush-era policies. For example, the fact that in 2008 the median household brought in $998 less than in 1998 can largely be traced back to sharply increased income inequality resultant of policies such as the Bush tax cuts (38 percent of which went to the top 1 percent of earners) .

As we embark on a new year and a new decade, here’s hoping that we can learn from the suffering of the past ten years. I can only anticipate that in 2020 I can say, “I am better off now than I was ten years ago.”