Why Americans Think All Politicians Fail Them
I have a new column in the Times of London that discusses why Americans currently dislike all politicians.
Through the first decade of the 21st century, it could almost be said: if something was big and important and attempted by the US government, it ended in failure.
To truly appreciate the mood of America in 2011, however, it’s important to view the record from the individual point of view.
Imagine you are more prosperous than average white American on the verge of retirement.
When you turned 50 at the end of the 1990s, the future seemed to hold great promise. Your wages were rising handsomely. Your important investments – your house, your personal retirement account – was gaining value. Your children found new jobs easily.
The social problems that you remembered from the 1960s and 1970s seemed to be fading away too.
Crime was successfully suppressed. Family break-up had become noticeably less common in your college-educated social class. Your children may have had more sexual partners before marriage than you, but they were statistically less likely to get divorced after marriage than your boomer-cohort contemporaries.
Above all: American world primacy seemed to have been definitively restored. Communism had been overthrown, OPEC broken, and socialism discredited. Japan had lost a decade, the EU seemed gripped by Euro-sclerosis. But America – in 1998 it seemed ascendant in a way it had not been ascendant since 1958.
Now step forward in time.
That 50-year-old is now in his or her early 60s.
The wealth in his or her retirement accounts? Much was lost in the dot.com crash of 2000, when the tech-heavy NASDAQ index lost 40% of its value in just a few weeks. The remainder was hammered in the crashes of the fall of 2008, the spring of 2009, and the spring of 2010.
Yes, overall market averages have recovered. Buy-and-hold investors have recouped many of their losses. But small investors typically react to market drops by liquidating their positions at the bottom.
For those who can get beyond the pay wall to read the rest, click here.