Looking back on the economic collapse

The recession officially began seven years ago this month, which makes it a good time to look back and assess the damage. The carnage is impressive.

To start with the top-line numbers, we have already lost almost $10.5 trillion in output because of the downturn. This is the value of the goods and services that could have been produced over the last seven years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), but were not because of all the people thrown out of work by the recession.

To put this figure in context, it comes to more than $33,000 per person in the United States, or $132,000 for a family of four. There are a lot of people in Washington who have been yelling about the cost of the food stamp program. But the amount of money we lost because of the recession is almost 140 times the current annual budget for that program.

For another comparison, the government looks to lose about $500 million on the loan guarantees it made to Solyndra, a start-up solar-energy company that received stimulus money and later went bankrupt, to the guffaws of conservatives. The money lost because of the recession is 21,000 times what taxpayers lost on Solyndra. If we spent an hour yelling about Solyndra and we wanted our yelling time to be proportional to the amount of money lost, if we started on Jan. 1, 2015, we would have to be yelling about the recession around the clock until May 24, 2017. And this doesn’t even count the roughly $2 trillion in annual losses from the downturn for the rest of the decade that are implied by current CBO projections.