Reasonable measures of the “output gap” over the past five years — the difference between the value of goods and services America could and should have produced and what it actually produced — run well over $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of pure waste, which we will never get back.And consider an even more tragic waste of human potential. Before the crisis, 63 percent of adult Americans were employed; that number quickly fell to less than 59 percent, and there it remains.
