"Good venture capitalists in the late 90s got so much money they become private-equity firms and nobody was doing real early-stage investing in innovative companies," he told a Brookings Institution forum Thursday. And that produced what he calls "a lost decade" that clouds the economic horizon and contributed to the global financial crisis.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States expanded at an annual rate of 1.60 percent in the last reported quarter. From 1947 until 2010 the United States' average quarterly GDP Growth was 3.31 percent reaching an historical high of 17.20 percent in March of 1950 and a record low of -10.40 percent in March of 1958. The economy of the United States is the largest in the world. The United States is a market-oriented economy where private individuals and business firms make most of the decisions. The federal and state governments buy needed goods and services predominantly in the private marketplace.

Fairly or not, Ruffini raises an interesting question: How much unemployment can we blame on the Obama administration? Economist Rob Shapiro dug into some Bureau of Labor Statistics data and came back with the best numbers I've seen on the subject. He separated job losses into two buckets: Those that happened before the stimulus, which was Obama's major effort to deal with joblessness, and those that happened after the stimulus.