Please let me be wrong

“How many times are they going to keep saying that?” I heard myself mutter this morning after being told for the umpteenth time that economic recovery was just around the corner. Again.

The fact that these assurances are coming from the same partisans who just a year or two ago were talking down the economy when a different party was in power makes me more than a little suspicious. It seems like we’ve been turning that proverbial corner for over a year now, and all that we find is another corner.

If the numbers mean anything, this vaunted recovery could still be a year or two away–if then. Let’s look at some real numbers:

The good folks at CalculatedRisk have gone to the trouble of putting unemployment numbers from the current as well as prior recessions into a graphic format, where they’re not just intelligible; they’re downright dramatic.

This graph shows the typical inverted bell curve of downturn and recovery from 11 different recessions. What jumps out, of course, is how much deeper is the current Great Recession in terms of employment.

You can also see that the deeper the downturn, usually the longer the recovery. Not always–the 2001 recession being one exception–but the trend is there. Not to mention that it also just kind of stands to reason.

Now, when those recessions are aligned at their nadir–i.e., where they bottom out–another trend appears. This bottom is roughly the halfway mark of the cycle, which is the reason I called it an inverted bell curve.

The implications? When the day comes that we can finish drawing the other half of our current cycle on the graph, it looks like we’re going to be 20 to 24 months farther down the road. Oh sure, other parts of the economy may get there faster. But remember, employment is a lagging indicator. You don’t get eggs before you get the chicken, as Dan Rather might say.

But there’s a catch: These are only trends–pretty impressive and remarkable trends. But there’s really nothing to say this cycle has to follow the traditional course.

Say Congress spends hundreds of billions of dollars to jump start the economy and save or create millions of new jobs. Oh, wait. They already did that.

OK, say 10 percent unemployment becomes the New Normal. Then what happens? The red line stays right where it is.

If you’ve been to Back to Work more than once or twice, you may already know that’s where my money is. I’m a bear and a believer in the New Normal. I believe much of the massive job loss we’ve experienced–including my own–may not be so temporary after all.

And I hope and pray I’m wrong. Meanwhile, we need to be preparing for the possibility I’m not.

If you don’t find a decent job in the next 18 months to two years, do you have a Plan B? If not, I strongly recommend you get one. And come back to Back to Work. Plans Bs Are Us.