Maybe it’s finally time for America to wake up and face the ugly truth: We are in a prolonged economic slump with no end in sight.
I, for one, have grown weary of cheerleading economists who’ve declared a recovery is at hand with every little uptick they find in the otherwise abysmal economic news. I also find it hard to believe the recession ended in June 2009. And that if economic growth turns negative, they’ll just call it another recession, as if we got out of the last one.
This is not your father’s recession, according to Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Greg Hannsgen of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, who’ve recently released a paper by that title. Click here to read it. It’s a quick,one-pager. Here are some excerpts:
“The mainstream economics profession has been resistant to the very idea that growth in a market economy could stagnate over a protracted period.”
“Considering the already severe slump in job creation, it hardly matters whether such a downturn would constitute the second dip of a double-dip’ recession, a continuation of the ‘Great Recession,’ or a confirmation that the economy has entered a Japanese-style ‘lost decade.’
“The recession has turned into a prolonged and very unusual slump in growth, preventing a labor-market recovery. The government has barely begun the task of creating the new jobs needed to deal with this disaster.”
