If I hear one more idiot say that s/he/it is voting for Romney because “Obama has had four years to fix the economy and has failed”, I’m gonna go stark raving, lip-blibblipping, crazy! And that’s whether it’s someone on TV, on a blog, or some low-info voter friend of mine who might be a nice person but is either too stupid or too lazy to find out the facts.
Below Ginger’s pubic hair is what I want to say to this imbecile:
Q: How long SHOULD it take to recover from a recession like this one?
A: I don’t know, but it should have been over by now! Even really bad recessions like in 1973 or 1981 are usually over in about two years.
NO, YOU BLITHERING MORON! I said: “A recession like this one!”
This is NOT a “business cycle” recession like ’73 or ’81 or any other recession that happened in your adult life, where demand decreases and businesses reduce inventory and staff. This is a FINANCIAL CRISIS RECESSION, and very few living Americans have experienced one of those as a working adult.
And the only reason that ANY living Americans have experienced one is because they last a bloody long time! The last one began in 1929, so anyone who was 17 when it started is now about 100 years old. But it lasted for ten years – it was 1939 before the US GDP was back to where it was in 1929! But someone who is 90 might just remember looking for a job at the tail end of the Great Depression.
How long should it take to recover from a financial crisis recession? We’ve had only six previous ones in this county in the past 175 years. (Isn’t George W. Bush a genius for bringing back something we thought was extinct? Maybe we should get him some dinosaur DNA!) They occurred in 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and the previously mentioned 1929.
Recovery from a financial crisis takes a LOT longer than from a business cycle recession because the confidence in the credit system that is needed for business expansion, for consuming, and for lending, is eroded and takes a long time to heal. Of the financial crises above, only ONE (1) took LESS than five years for the economy (as measured by GDP) to recover: 1857, when (a) a relatively mild (and quite sectionally-limited) crisis, (b) European stockpiling of Southern cotton, and (c) the Civil War combined to re-ignite the economy. Here are the durations of each of these previous crises based on permanent recovery of GDP:
1837: 7 years
1857: 3 years
1873: 5 years
1893: 5 years
1907: 6 years
1929: 10 years
Current: Four years (incl. time in the Administration of The Village Idiot).
The average number of years for each previous recovery from a financial crisis recession is six years (36 years divided by 6).
So, if idiots want to say that this recovery is “taking too long”, they’re right; it is – but tell them to blame the moron who started the first one of these in 80 years, and whom many of today's whining jerks voted for not once, but twice!