I’m not going to bother quoting anything from The Wall Street Journal about how there is no “double dip” and everything is fine. If you want to bury your head in the sand, go right ahead and dig in with them over there. I also feel no compulsion at this point to fight with conservatives who think the answer is to end all taxation of everything, as if that would somehow ease the recession. We’ve seen how false that is since Reagan, but conservatives hold on and on to that falsehood as if by magic it’ll become true. Although I have to admit to some admiration for Bush Sr. for calling his predecessor’s policies “voodoo economics”. Just remember, my liberal brethren, even with a cage of rats strapped to your head, 1+1=2. Tax cuts don’t work. With that out of the way, via NPR (that bastion of wonderfully informative and unbiased reporting), comes a prediction of more frequent recessions over the next decade (thanks to Xanthippas):

Mr. ACHUTHAN: And the bigger concern, beyond what may happen in 2011, which is maybe like 50-50 chance of a new recession, the bigger concern is that in the coming decade, we are almost sure to see more frequent recessions than we’ve been used to at any time since the early 1980s. And that brings with it a huge host of problems.

RAZ: Explain why.

Mr. ACHUTHAN: Well, the business cycle is more volatile, more like booms and busts, combined with lower altitude, weaker and weaker trend growth. Ever since the 1970s, the pace of economic expansion in the U.S. has been stair-stepping down, getting weaker and weaker. And the last expansion was the weakest expansion since World War II on every single count of how strong an expansion can be.

Say what? Economic expansion in the US sucks? I’m kidding, I knew this of course, as did you if you’re a regular reader. The problem is that most people don’t realize that in the first place and think the recession we’re going through has to do with very proximal causes (such as Obama’s health-care plan) instead of very long-term trends that have little to do with the current administration’s policies. For example, check out this depressing piece about people who can’t find jobs.

For young adults, the prospects in the workplace, even for the college-educated, have rarely been so bleak. Apart from the 14 percent who are unemployed and seeking work, as Scott Nicholson is, 23 percent are not even seeking a job, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The total, 37 percent, is the highest in more than three decades and a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.

The college-educated among these young adults are better off. But nearly 17 percent are either unemployed or not seeking work, a record level (although some are in graduate school). The unemployment rate for college-educated young adults, 5.5 percent, is nearly double what it was on the eve of the Great Recession, in 2007, and the highest level — by almost two percentage points — since the bureau started to keep records in 1994 for those with at least four years of college.

Times change. The article mostly follows a young man. His  father and grandfather didn’t need a college degree to find a job, and their jobs lasted for decades. Now, he has a degree and struggles to find a job. At the moment, there are supposedly 5 unemployed people per job opening. That’s a lot of people who are just out of luck.

I rarely write about (or care about) stock market news, but I did think this article about a prediction of an unprecedented crash in the stock market was interesting. Mostly that kind of financial news has so little to offer us real people that I’m able to ignore it completely, but if that guy is right, it actually will affect a lot of us. People who rely on retirement investments would be deeply hurt by it, not to mention I’m sure there would be massive corporate die-offs.

What path can America take to get out of this recession? Should we hope for another world war to help us out? Should we end all taxes? Should we put ourselves in another couple of trillion dollars of debt to provide economic stimulus? The first probably isn’t going to happen. The second would make about 50% of the population ecstatic until they died from drinking their filthy tapwater, but there are enough intelligent people still in office that that won’t happen either. The third won’t be allowed to happen by people who are focused on Niagara falls 30 miles away instead of the rock 10 feet in front. And so, as seems so inevitable these days, we sit and do nothing.