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Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era. We're still weeks away from the end of '09, but it's not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want - just give thanks...
...resounding no. Let us count the ways. For one thing, the stock market is down 26% since 2000, making this the worst decade for stocks. (Inflation-adjusted, it's even worse.) I remember Warren Buffett telling me at the beginning of the decade that there was no way the go-go returns of the 1990s were going to continue and that we had better get used to meager returns going forward. Buffett saw it coming. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
Companies go belly-up all the time, but in this decade there were an inordinate number of bankruptcies. The creative destruction of the Internet had a part in this. While the Web opened up new worlds and created thousands of jobs at Amazon, Google and the like, it displaced workers at travel and government agencies, at newspapers and magazines and at stores like Circuit City and Tower Records - traditional distribution points for services, information and goods. Economists call that disintermediation. (See pictures of retailers that have gone out of business...
...hope that pro-life Democrats were going to go quietly into the night was shattered in the final hours before the House passed its version of the health care bill on Nov. 7. Sixty-four pro-life Dems joined most Republicans in voting for an amendment authored by Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat, which aims to ensure that no federal dollars can go - directly or indirectly - to funding abortions in the new health-insurance marketplace that is envisioned by the bill. Pro-choice advocates insist that the amendment goes too far, beyond the decades-old Hyde Amendment, the federal...
...also lobbied heavily on the issue - might hope for. Casey's amendment would boost services to pregnant women to help educate them on their choices. "I think it would help a lot of folks on both sides feel more comfortable about the bill," Casey says. That certainly won't go far enough for pro-life advocates who say the current language in the Reid bill - a version of the separation-of-funds idea - is "an enormous disappointment, creating a new and completely unacceptable federal policy that endangers human life and rights of conscience," as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops...