Krugman's column today highlights just how bad the 'Zero Decade' truly was. He writes:

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

But there's more:

even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.

Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.

More after the jump.

And what was the cause of all this misery? Two things in my estimation. First, military spending went through the roof. Iraq and Afghanistan are two massive sinkholes of blood and treasure. It's now estimated that the US defense budget is larger than all the money all the states combined spend:

Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.

For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls "defense" in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That's more than all the state governments collect.

The second problem is the three decade long transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy in America and America's refusal to tax the wealthy in a progressive manner. Even today idiots like this write things like this:

By increasing marginal tax rates at high income levels, the millionaire surtax in the House health care reform bill would promote tax avoidance and impede savings and investment, reducing wages throughout the economy. Taxing a mere 0.3 percent of the population is not a sustainable way to pay for health care reform.

What was it Willy Sutton said about robbing banks? Oh yeah, that's where the money is. Well, America: all your wealth belongs to the wealthy in this country. All of you who work at Wal-Mart for minmum wage; all you folks who work in cubicle land as temps for $12 an hour with no insurance; all you who have $50k in student loans and a worthless degree; all of you had factory jobs making something people valued and lost your jobs because they paid you too much; all of you, your wealth is in the hands of malefactors that have done nothing but steal from you for three decades. What are you going to do? Anything? Or are you just going to watch another episode of the 'Biggest Loser' and giggle that your life ain't that pathetic? You do, however, have options.

As Ian succinctly notes:

You can either do what it takes to fix the problems or you can’t. If it’s true that you can’t, then I quite seriously, sadly, and with utmost sincerity suggest that you either start learning how to survive in a societal meltdown, or you get out, or you hope that your number comes up in the next few years so you don’t have to pay the bill that comes due when people think they can live in fantasy land, on credit, forever.

It's time to get out our pitchforks.