The Atlantic

America Wasted Its Chance to Push the Economy Forward

Interest rates were low for years. Imagine how much the country could have gotten done.
Source: Jonathan Alcorn / Bloomberg / Getty

We blew it.

That is the queasy feeling I have as I watch borrowing costs surge, housing starts fall, and politicians rush to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption. Americans had a decade-plus in which interest rates were low and millions of workers were unemployed or underemployed. We could have made investments that would have benefited all of us. And we wasted that chance.   

This period of unusually low , which lasted from the 2008 global financial crisis until now, was horrible in many ways. Too many people were unemployed for too long, and too many found themselves trapped in dead-end, no-security jobs while the cost of living climbed to

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