Throw your mind back to September 10, 2001. The price of gas: $1.40 per gallon. 

The national debt: $5 trillion dollars, sizeable but only about half of what it is today. 

America had over 3 million more manufacturing jobs.  

The trade deficit too was around half of today's. A budget surplus. The US population: 282 million, about 20 million less than now. And the unkindest cut of all: you were seven years younger. 

Good and serene as that time looks in retrospect, things were even better than mere numbers may indicate. Consider this. 

The day before 9-11, how many would have accepted a suggestion that seven years later, they would have been illegally spied upon, phones tapped and emails sniffed? 

That they would be entangled in two foreign wars?

That New Orleans would disappear in a baffling act of incompetence and neglect?  

Or that their government would authorize torture?  

Or that fabled names in the financial industry would loot and cheat them, under the very eyes and noses of their own government?  

That insult would be added to injury by their being made to pay for a bailout of the very perpetrators of these same crimes? 

Cleaning Up After Bush