We have been in the longest slowest economic recovery in American history (five years since the beginning of 2008).
There have been many speculative suggestions for the reasons. So far I have favored the hypothesis that the federal stimulus money diverted capital investment needed for the recovery and that the Obama administration has shown such great hostility toward commerce that it suppressed investment as well.
What I want to discuss here are the actual policies that could have stimulated the economy and still could.
The number one most important source of government led economic stimulus would be an expansion of free trade agreements and reduction of domestic tariffs and tariff barriers. Our economy would skyrocket. One such agreement is on the horizon: the Trans Pacific Partnership.
The number two source of Federal economic stimulus would be a fiat percentage reduction in EPA, OSHA and the Dept. of the Interior regulations that are hostile to business.
Number three would be a national model law for environmental evaluations of new projects, EIRs, that would limit the evaluation to two printed pages and one month for preparation. A national law on this subject would trump local laws.
Similarly the fourth source of stimulus would be a national model building code that focused almost exclusively on fire, flood and earthquake safety. There should be national incentives to get local jurisdictions to accept the model code. Buildings could be mass-produced as well as imported.
Those four efforts to stimulate the economy should probably result in dramatic investment success.