The U.S. Economy Is Recovering Too Slowly From the Last Recession

1 min readBy: Andrew Lundeen, Kyle Pomerleau

The global financial crisis dramatically harmed the U.S. economy, reducing overall output by $455 billion in real terms.

Typically after recessions, the economy quickly recovers. However, this recovery has not been quick. While the U.S. economy has been growing for the past couple of years, it has been slow—too slow to fully recover from the crisis.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the U.S. economy will permanently remain below the pre-recessionA recession is a significant and sustained decline in the economy. Typically, a recession lasts longer than six months, but recovery from a recession can take a few years. trend. This permanent gap due to the recession means that the economy will still be $4.5 trillion below its previous trend by 2020.

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About the Authors

Andrew Lundeen

Director of Federal Projects
Kyle Pomerleau Tax Foundation

Kyle Pomerleau

Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Kyle Pomerleau is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax policy.

Before joining AEI, Mr. Pomerleau was chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, where he led the macroeconomic and tax modeling team and wrote on various tax policy topics, including corporate taxation, international tax policy, carbon taxation, and tax reform.