Twenty years ago, we were in the midst of the dot-com boom. President Clinton was in office, and was busy presiding over the biggest peacetime economic boom in American history. Incomes were exploding, and newly minted millionaires were being churned out by the thousands. People were investing in brand new companies with funny sounding names like Yahoo, and Google. It was a time of intense optimism and exploding growth.

What Happened?

You may not remember it, but there was even talk that with budget surpluses on the horizon, we were in danger of paying off our national debt! It's true; one of the reasons that candidate Bush wanted tax cuts was to slow down the rate of debt repayment, for fear that the bond market would go berserk as the debt started to disappear wholesale. Of course, in the very next breath those same folks assured us that tax cuts would increase revenues and we'd be positively swimming in money after they were enacted, to say nothing of the rampant job growth that was sure to follow hot on the tax cuts' heels.

The problem, unfortunately, was that after two rounds of tax cuts, a couple of funny things happened. First, revenues didn't increase. We did go from black ink back to red, which meant that we were no longer in any “danger” of paying off our national debt, and the mad jobs growth that was suppose to happen just never seemed to materialize either.

That, coupled with the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and combined with fighting a pair of wars while cutting taxes combined to create a perfect storm which broke across the economy in December of 2007, which of course was the start of the Great Recession; the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression of 1929.

We Are Still Living With The Results

Global markets tanked, unemployment skyrocketed, and incomes contracted. They haven't recovered to this day. True, they're moving in the right direction again, but it will be some time yet before we get back to where we were twenty years ago. The current millennial generation, just now entering the workforce, has lower expectations for the future than their parents did, and they're probably right to feel that way.

The troubling and disappointing thing is, that this is the first time that's happened in the entire span of American history. As a nation, we've begun to increasingly scale back our expectations out of simple necessity. Increasingly, our economy is becoming a kind of “winner take all” lottery in which there are a handful of fantastically wealthy individuals, and then there's everybody else, who gets by as they're able. We've become used to smaller houses, used cars, in general, we have all round lowered expectations.

Call it the downsizing of the American Dream, and perhaps it was overdue. You could argue, and even argue compellingly that it was a pipe dream that every generation of Americans would enjoy a better lifestyle than the one that came before it. Pipe Dream or no, it has been something that has been burned into the American psyche, and its sudden reversal has not gone unnoticed, nor been well received. The current generation seems resigned to it, but do not mistake that for being pleased about it. They're not, and they shouldn't be. In many ways, we've brought the current state of affairs on ourselves, and shame on us for doing so. We can do better; we owe it to our children to do better.