The Great Recession is remembered, and properly so, for its massive destruction of household wealth and job losses that reached over 800,000 in a single month. In just the fourth quarter of 2008, real GDP fell at an annual rate of 8.4 percent, while economies across the world were savaged by problems as bad as … Continue reading
Federal revenues and outlays regularly respond to cyclical movements in the economy in ways that tend to dampen those movements; the budget mechanisms that drive that process are known as automatic stabilizers. Those mecha- nisms help stabilize the economy automatically, without any legislated changes in tax or spending policies. In this report, the Congressional budget … Continue reading
Automatic stabilizers—mechanisms built into the federal budget that increase spending or decrease taxes when the economy slows without any vote from Congress– are a major tool the government uses to respond to recession. For instance, spending on unemployment compensation automatically increases when there are more people out of work. During the Great Recession, automatic stabilizers … Continue reading