But immigration is a subset of a larger global problem. The dominant economic event of our era is the Great Recession, which began in 2007 and ended for the U.S. in 2009. Its status as a “great” economic downturn is attributed to its long aftermath of unemployment and, more important, underemployment.
As the U.S. and European economies failed to achieve pre-recession growth levels, which exacerbated social anxieties, the elites produced an explanation. They called it “the new normal.”
.. The new normal” theory, which in a wink became conventional wisdom among conventional economists and pundits, exists mainly to absolve them—and Barack Obama —of responsibility for weaker growth’s dire effects on national standards of living. What the theory failed to capture is that the new normal creates angry have-nots.
.. Voters everywhere are rebelling against the new normal. They won’t concede its implicit acceptance of flattened opportunities for younger Americans or Europeans still in their prime working years, who don’t have sinecures explaining to everyone else why this is as good as it will ever get. Increasingly, they are voting into office political outliers—from Trump to Macron to Kurz.
.. Mr. Trudeau’s economic plan should be seen as a proxy for what the next Democratic presidential nominee is likely to run on. Influenced by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers’s theories on “secular stagnation,” Mr. Trudeau is making massive outlays on infrastructure repair and modernization to revive demand inside Canada.
.. Donald Trump is an infrastructure guy, too, but his path out of the new normal’s long-term trap runs mainly through regulatory relief and reforming the U.S. tax system.
.. U.S. firms kept 71% of their foreign-earned profits abroad, “benefiting other nations’ workers.” What would be the effect, Mr. Hassett asked, if for the next eight years, those profits were repatriated and reinvested here through a tax regime designed to promote more capital investment in the domestic economy? Incomes would rise.