A twittertmate, Jake Planton of Rose City Mortgage, tweeted a few minutes ago that Time magazine is saying the ‘00’s are the worst decade ever.  Now, this is a departure for Jake. Talk about buying or refinancing a home in or around Portland, and he’s all over it. If you have concerns on the dangers of the first-time buyers’ tax credit, check out his blog.

I mean, Jake comes off as a pretty optimistic guy. The 00’s the worst ever? I had to think about that one.

OK, start with the Y2K scare of 1999-2000. Remember that? When all the worlds’ computers were set to crash because their internal clocks would reset to 1900 instead of 2000 and bring down the world as we know it?

Then, we had a contentious presidential election decided by the Supreme Court in favor of the candidate who received the smaller popular vote.  No one shot anyone else, so things were cool and we all went away happy.

The dot-com boom turned out to be a dot-went.

The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon altered our country’s path for generations, resulting in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq . The strategic implications are still unclear, but the cost—about $1 trillion—is about what the country’s national debt is today. The decade started with a surplus.

The housing meltdown starting in 2007 and still not over has so impacted the world financial system that America, and the rest of the world, may not recover until 2014. Everyone wished for the good old days of never having heard of credit default swaps and derivatives.

And loan modifications, and short sales, and deeds-in-lieu-of and all that.

Other worries? Third-world and emerging nations with enormous, but marginalized and disenfranchised, populations with majorities under thirty, and they don’t like us very much. The Great Fall of China (maybe). Pakistan nuking Iran. Global warming. Swine flu. AIDS.

So, what about the last ‘00’s, the year 1000 A.D.? Well the Vikings were dismantling European coastal societies. The Black Death permeated cities. Some kings were thinking it might be cool to bounce infidels from the Holy Lands, although they didn’t start for a while. Spain was a Caliphate. Leif Ericson discovered Greenland (apparently it had been lost) and grew crops there, so maybe global warming was happening then, too. And that’s just Europe.

Could it be that any 00’s are ill-fated? America in the 1900’s saw the assassination of President McKinley, the so-called Progressive Era (when Republicans were the progressives and the Democrats were the wing nuts), the Spanish-American War (gotta have a war). In the 1800’s, pirates were a problem off Africa, Jefferson bought about 40% of America from the French (not counting what everyone took from the Indians), there was an uprising in Serbia and France was not recovered from its own Revolutionary War.

2010 is right around the corner, and I can’t wait for it to end. Maybe we should start a write-in campaign to just skip it and make the next January 1 2011 instead.