Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!
Ignore the downers. America is already great, and it’s getting greater.
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD | January 06, 2016
As we enter 2016, Americans are still feeling grouchy. Only one-fourth of the public believes the United States is heading in the right direction. The Republican presidential debates have been malaise-a-thons, competitions to portray American decline in the most apocalyptic terms possible, while Bernie Sanders is pursuing the Democratic nomination with a message so depressing that professional curmudgeon Larry David has basically played him straight. A year after I wrote an article only somewhat ironically titled Everything Is Awesome, cable news is an endless Debbie Downer loop of terrorism fears and market jitters, periodically interrupted by a weirdly coifed nativist blowhard promising to Make America Great Again.
Ignore that guy. Ignore cable, too.
America is already great, and it’s getting greater. Not everything is awesome, but in general, things are even more awesome than they were a year ago. The rest of the world can only wish it had our problems. Start with the economy, which, if you listen to Sanders or the Republicans, is a garbage dump of existential despair. Actually, it’s doing quite well. Unemployment has dropped from 10 percent during the worst of the Great Recession to 5 percent today, thanks to a record 69 consecutive months of private-sector employment growth that has produced 13.7 million new jobs.
The past two years have been the best two years for job creation in the 21 century. After a near-death experience during the financial meltdown of 2008, the U.S. auto industry enjoyed record sales in 2015. The housing market has also rebounded from the crisis, and aftertax corporate profits are at an all-time high. It can sound partisan to mention those facts when a Democrat is in the White House, but they’re facts; it ought to be possible to acknowledge them without necessarily giving President Obama too much credit for them.
In any case, the oft-predicted doomsday scenarios of the post-crisis era—doubledip recession, runaway inflation, runaway interest rates, out-of-control energy prices, a health insurance death spiral, a Greek-style debt crisis, a run on the dollar—are still stubbornly refusing to materialize. Growth is modest but steady.
Inflation is low. Interest rates are very low, although the Fed felt confident enough about the recovery to raise them last month for the first time since the global financial meltdown.
Gas is barely $2 a gallon. About 17 million uninsured Americans have gotten coverage in the past few years. The federal deficit has plunged from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to under $500 billion, while the dollar has gained strength against foreign currencies. That’s a reflection of the relative strength of the U.S. economy—European unemployment is still in double digits, while Latin America and Asia are reeling—but it’s also an obstacle to even better growth, making our exports more expensive. In that sense, we’re victims of our own success, although it’s way better to be us than them.
Skeptics often portray the U.S. economy as weaker than the data suggest—because underemployment and long-term unemployment rates are still somewhat high, although they’re now falling even faster than the regular unemployment rate;
because the “labor participation rate” is actually getting worse, although that's mostly a result of baby-boomer retirements and increased college attendance; or because too many of the newly created jobs are part time, which is simply untrue.
The most widespread criticism is that wages have been stagnant for decades, a legitimate problem, but wages actually grew 2 percent faster than inflation over the past year.
Meanwhile, other recent developments—cheaper gas, free birth control and preventive care, the elimination of annual and lifetime caps on health insurance, expanded tax credits for the working poor, increased efficiency measures that lower energy bills, and much more—have put more money in the pockets of American families, even though their incomes have grown slowly. Health care prices have risen at their lowest rate in half a century since the passage of Obamacare, increasing just 1.3 percent over the past year. Tuition costs are still soaring and Americans now hold more than $1.2 trillion in student debt, but the Obama administration has quietly changed the rules to let borrowers cut their payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income and get their loans forgiven after 20 years. Savings rates have almost doubled since the crisis, and family debt burdens have dropped to 2002 levels.
In non-economic news, despite a year of furor over mass shootings and urban unrest, crime in big cities dropped about 5 percent in 2015, and has been cut in half since 1990. The teen birth rate is down more than 60 percent since 1990, and that’s not because of increasing abortions, because they’ve fallen by more than a third. U.S. oil imports are at their lowest level in nearly three decades, while wind generation is up more than threefold and solar generation is up 25-fold since 2008. Carbon emissions have dropped 10 percent from 2005 levels. High school graduation rates are at an all-time high, with the most striking gains for minorities and the poor. The financial sector is much safer, with much more capital to absorb banking losses, much less of the risky overnight funding that fuels panics, and much broader regulation of Wall Street institutions that once operated in the shadows. And despite all the rhetoric about border crises and wall-building, America’s population of undocumented immigrants has remained stable for the past five years.
In an era of legislative gridlock in Washington, those are pretty cool developments. And guess what? Legislative gridlock in Washington eased significantly in 2015. After four years of divided-government paralysis, President Obama signed a slew of major bipartisan laws last year, including a bizarrely responsible reform of a long-standing Medicare funding problem and a sensible overhaul of the unpopular No Child Left Behind education law. Republicans and Democrats also came together to pass some more dubious laws, like a long-term highway bill that will use budget gimmicks to finance America’s unsustainable addiction to asphalt. The point is, for better or for worse, Congress is doing stuff again.
Glass-half-empty types, especially Republican glass-half-empty types, argue that none of this really matters when Americans don’t feel safe from jihadists. And yes, the attack in San Bernardino was horrible. But only 45 Americans have been killed by jihadists since 2001, fewer than the death count from lightning or toddlers with guns or just about any disease you can imagine. If Americans are freaking out anyway, well, maybe they shouldn’t. And incidentally, American soldiers are dramatically safer now that so many of them have come home from war zones. Last year, only eight were killed in Iraq and 27 in Afghanistan, after more than 8,000 casualties in the previous 12 years.
In general, this is an exciting time to be a human being. We’re living longer. There’s less war, less infant mortality, less abject poverty. The phones we carry in our pockets today are more powerful than the supercomputers of a few decades ago, giving us 24-hour access to all the world’s accumulated knowledge, not to mention music and cat videos and GPS.
There’s actually good stuff on TV, and we can watch it whenever we want. There are still challenges, of course, like global warming and Islamic terrorism, but the world is making progress in confronting those challenges. And there is still no better place to live in that world than the United States of America, which still has the most powerful military, the
most dynamic economy, the best action movies.
Again, the point is not that things are perfect. The point is that things are better.
Have a very happy new year; hopefully, 2016 will be even more awesome.
2016 Elections: Everything is (Even More) Awesome - POLITICO Magazine
, but the clock's about to run out on insurance.
