Things may not have looked too bad because government went on a hiring and spending spree on education and healthcare (thus ensuring that jobs were created - in the publc sector, not in the private sector, as the claim of "dynamism" suggests), from its skim of the financial plunder - ensuring that the government is now broke as a large source of income dries up, just at the moment it would be needed to do contra-cyclical policies.

In other words, government hid the plunder by its spending, and is now as naked as the population.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes