Over the past eight quarters, the U.S. economy has nearly equaled its performance during the 1990s tech boom, with average gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 3.7 percent. However, between the last peak in economic activity in March 2001 and September 2004, the U.S. economy added barely a quarter million new wage and salary jobs, a number that would have been typical of one month’s job growth in the late 1990s.