In the early 1990s, Japan rapidly descended from a global economic powerhouse to a country that kept bailing out unprofitable “zombie” companies that were too big to fail but too in debt to succeed. The Japanese economy flat-lined. The United States made the same mistakes and is already halfway into the American equivalent of Japan’s “lost decade,” says former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, who heads the nonprofit Free Congress Foundation after chairing the Republican National Committee and a national anti-terrorism commission.

At Gilmore’s behest, economists looked at exports, consumer and government spending and investment activity since the start of the Great Recession. “The only category falling relative to GDP is investment,” Gilmore noted in a Dec. 13 op-ed published in Investor’s Business Daily. “Net investment was down 80.5 percent during the recession, and is still down 66.9 percent during the so-called recovery.”