the US will have another depresion

Let me first say that I believe that the United States will enter into a recession. The political leaders and Bush have already announced that we are in the beginning stages of a recession. This is mostly because of the "War on Terror" and the financial burden it imposes on the country as a whole. Recession or Depression...when one looks at the two definitions side-by-side, it's hard to tell the difference, since the definition is very vague. And people have a vague idea of the distinct difference between the two. ----------------- Fact: + A Recession is defined as a decline in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for two or more consecutive quarters. + Now, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a recession is much more complicated. They define a recession as the time when business activity has reached its peak and starts to fall until the time when business activity bottoms out. They look at several factors to determine whether a recession is taking place, such as the amount of business activity in the economy by looking at things like employment, industrial production, real income and wholesale-retail sales. When the business activity starts to rise again it is called an expansionary period. By this definition, the average recession lasts about a year. ----------------- Fact: + A Depression is defined as a long-term economic state characterized by unemployment and low prices and low levels of trade and investment. + A simpler definition: a recession that lasts longer and has a larger decline in business activity. ------------------ So how do we as American's tell the difference between the two? How do we as American's know whether we are in a recession or depression? The first thing we need to do is look at changes in the GNP, a depression is considered to be any economic downturn where real GDP declines by more than 10 percent. A recession is an economic downturn that is less severe. According to bea.gov, the GDP has declines by 2.5% since the beginning of 2008. Now by definition, a "depression" is a GDP decline greater than 10%, so by this we cannot say that the USA will enter a depression, nor are we even close. Also, when one thinks of a depression the first that comes to mind is obviously the Great Depression of the 1920s. The stock market crashed, as a result people were withdrawing their money from every bank and account. Some had all their investments in stocks, so when it crashed they lost everything. Because we as a country were in the midst of a World War, jobs that would be considered essential, such an automobile assemblyman or a milkman, did not hold the same value as it once had. The USA needed every resource necessary in aid for the war, as a result thousands lost their jobs. This leads me into my next point. Fact: According to cia.gov, the USA's 2007 unemployment rate was 4.6%. As of June 2007, the population was 301,139,947 (cia.gov). This means that 13,852,438 people are unemployed. Also, according to cia.gov, the United States is currently home to over 12,000,000 illegal immigrants. And out of those illegal immigrants, over 75% (9,000,000) are employed. -------------------- My point here is that people are losing jobs, it happens everyday, but they are losing them for a different reason. These are problems that were not as much of a problem as they are today. Illegal Immigrants are taking jobs away from our citizens because companies can afford to hire them cheap. People are not loosing their jobs as a direct result of the war, as was the case in the 1920s. Yes, the United States is going through rough financail times right now, but I don't think that we are going to suddenly plummit into a depression.