I was just starting high school when the so-called “Great Recession” began in 2007.
I’d say I was probably about as economically literate as any high school freshman could hope to be, and while I certainly won't claim to have understood every single thing I heard on the news about this crisis, I did grasp the basics as they related to me; that a bad economy meant bad job prospects.
Some basic research revealed that recessions were in fact relatively common, that most modern economies grow not in a straight line but in a series of “booms and busts” that make a chart of economic growth look like a series of mountain peaks, with each peak higher than the last.
The recessions, historically, have lasted a few years and been followed by several years of steady growth before the next recession occurred.
This was comforting news for 14-year-old me; by the time I’m looking for a real job the economy should be in a much better shape, bringing job prospects up with it.
Six years later and 20-year-old me is much less comforted. More than half a decade after the first symptoms, our economy seems to be as sick as ever.
For me (and for all the college aged individuals reading this) this means that job prospects are still abysmal at best: 8.5 percent of college graduates between age 21 and 24 are unemployed. What’s worse, 16.8 percent of that group are underemployed, meaning that they’re either working part time because they can’t find full time work or have given up on the job search entirely.
These numbers have barely budged since their “great recession” peaks of 9.7 percent and 18 percent, respectively. To put that in perspective they’re almost twice as bad as what we were averaging between 1994 (when I was born) and pre-recession 2008, over which time recent college grads could expect to face about 5 percent unemployment and 9 percent underemployment.
These terrifying numbers are symptoms of a greater problem; this economic recovery has been by far the worst in modern history.
There have been 6 recoveries from major recessions since 1960: 1961, 1975, 1982, 1991, 2001 and this one starting in 2009. The fastest of those recoveries was ’61, where the economy grew more than 25 percent in the first four years after the recession ended.
On the low end were ’91 and ’01, which were almost identical and grew about 14 percent in the first four years of recovery. By far the lowest is our current recovery at a meager 9 percent, or barely half the average of previous recoveries.
The traditional economic cure for recessions, as prescribed by Keynesian Economics, is government expenditure (and lots of it) in an attempt to stimulate the economy with an injection of government funds.
Employing this method, federal expenditure as a percentage of GDP has jumped higher than ever seen before, from 21 percent pre-recession to more than 25 percent now.
Our current recovery is the worst in modern history, despite unprecedentedly high government expenditure. Apparently Winston Churchill was correct when he argued “that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
For the sake of recent college graduates and anyone else with big bills and tiny incomes, let’s stop this insane level of spending that continues to be a failure. Let’s get the government out of the way. Let’s allow business to do what they do best; make goods, services, money and jobs.