Zero Net Job Creation

Now that we have seen all of the pointless top ten lists, we can get down to assessing the wasteland that was the last decade — what Paul Krugman calls the Big Zero.
Over at Delaware Liberal, Unstable Isotope points to this analysis from the Washington Post on just how bad the last ten years have been in terms of job creation:
It actually worse than the chart illustrates; Krugman says that over the last ten years "private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened."
It is an article of faith among free market fundamentalists that tax cuts and deregulation lead inevitably to economic growth. How then do they explain the last decade? Economics may be the dismal science, but it is still subject to empirical verification.