In these days of controversy and political wrangling, we seem to forget that America’s woes from an economic standpoint stem from eight straight years of GDP growth hovering around an average of 2.1 percent. Yes, the United States’ economy is still the largest in the world, but when we look at the past two decades, America’s growth rate has dropped dramatically. In the 1950s and ’60s, the average growth rate was about 4 percent. In the ’70s and ’80s, that dropped to around 3 percent. In the past ten years, it’s been around 2 percent. Since the second quarter...