Reform’s option, amid the ruins

 


Published/Last Modified on Sunday, February 7, 2010 4:11 AM MST

David Broder
Political Commentary

WASHINGTON ” The economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 did so much damage to the United States that only now can we begin to measure the devastation.

A sentence buried in the budget that President Obama submitted to Congress this week screamed for attention. “Household net worth fell from the third quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2009,” it said, “by $17.5 trillion or 26.5 percent, which is the equivalent to more than one year’s GDP.”

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Translated from economic jargon, what that sentence means is that America lost the benefits of an entire year of work ” of all that the brains and labor of American enterprise can produce, in the calamitous near-failure of Wall Street and the banking system.

The casualties of that upheaval are all around us, most notably in the 10 percent of Americans who are officially unemployed ” a figure that increases to 17 percent when you consider part-time workers and those who have become discouraged.

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