The Collapse of High-Tech is Killing the Economy

I don't believe this is an entirely honest appraisal of the situation. I seriously doubt the correlation between IT spending and productivity gains is the same today as it was in 1978 or 1988. Open source software has boomed since the late 1990s, that alone would be enough to meaningfully reduce IT software spending growth. The cost of hardware, the value you get for it, and the inability of most businesses to tax even old hardware, explains a huge drop in IT equipment spending growth.

Also, the rise of and combination of various technologies has eliminated entire sections of the hardware field. Fax machines, copiers, printers, cameras, landlines (and related networks), expensive storage, complex intranets, expensive database systems, the need to upgrade corporate PCs every few years, uber expensive department software, and on and on it goes - all of these things have been impacted head-on or eliminated by the rise of cheap hardware, smart phones, open source software, and cloud services. As a simple example, how much storage do I need for docs in a small business network? That need hasn't expanded at even a fraction of the pace of storage.

Simply put, you can now spend drastically less, and get drastically more for it, than you could in 1998.

The drop in IT spending growth is not killing the economy. That's like saying: if we just spent money we don't need to, it'd fix things (break some windows!).