Yo kids let me break it down to you and rap about this recession stuff. See, here's what it means: YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE YOUR JOB DEWD. Any other questions lol

My salary has remained stagnant while oil and gas prices continued to rise for the past 7 years, despite a supposedly great economy that occurred during that timeframe.

Why a recession would make this any worse than the current reality is beyond me.

"Big Stuff" like houses and cars. But I will have no problem getting my Tonka trucks and Legos because this article sounds like it was written for kindergarten kids.

People saving money is my understanding of how a Recession continues! The government wants to increase spending again by making tax cuts and giving Americans more money to spend (announced that every American will receive a cheque) in order to stop the downward spiral of Recession. Though saving is helpful on the brink of a Recession, if we all spent more money wouldn't that be overall better for the economy in reducing the effects of Recession, cos in turn we would get that money back from our employees? correct me if im wrong.

Assuming everyone spending money would prevent a recession, it makes sense from a personal standpoint not to spend. There are four basic combinations that describe the situation. You spend your money and everyone else spends their money. Recession avoided. If you save your money, and everyone else spends, then the recession is avoided, and you still have savings. If you spend, and everyone else saves, recession is not avoided and you have no savings.. If you and everyone else saves, recession is not avoided, but we all have some money saved. So, it only makes sense to spend if you are sure that everyone else is spending, and since you can't be sure of that, logically you need to save your money.

However, I'm just an engineer (in college) and have no real education in economics, correct me if I'm wrong.

Geordie

You are right to a point. Saving money will only help to fuel the recession however you have somewhat of a catch twenty two. If you do not save and you lose your job that would be much worse off than if you had put some of that cash away while you were working. Let's be honest here the ultimate concern will be for yourself and your families well being. Also consider this if people did go out and spend more much of what would be purchased would be manufactured in another country and instead of us fueling our economy we would be fueling theirs. Giving a check to people would not be an ideal way of helping our economy. If everyone were to get a few hundred dollars they in general will either save it because of fear of recession or spend it but a few hundred doesn't go far. To energize our economy we need to CREATE jobs for Americans. Take that same money and fix our infrastructure in this country thereby creating jobs and pumping that money back into OUR economy.

Well, if you haven't figured this out already, you should probably be careful with your spending because of the whole you-might-lose-your-job thing. Or, you can sell everything, buy nothing, put your cash under the mattress and rock back and forth in the corner like Demi Moore did in St. Elmo's Fire.

putting the cash under the mattress won't help much either because inflation will cause the money to lose it value over time. i am no expert but we should try understand macroeconomics better before we can just go around advising people. that too financial ones.

A recession is easily avoided, just cut the budget by $1 trillion/year. You can cut half that by withdrawing the 500,000 troops from places like Iraq, Afghanistan, but don't forget Korea, Japan and Germany, and thousands more.

Imagine 500,000 troops spending their money in america, and the government with $1 trillion more/year to put against the debt.

@Michael Liberty
While I'm whole-heartedly with you on ending the murder-fest in Iraq (I'm generally anti-murder), I'm not sure it will play out like you say. While it's true that we'll be spending less on the war, I'm not totally sold on the idea that the returning troops will be adding to the economy. Remember, that the main reason folks are in the army are because they're too dumb/poor to do anything else. They'll be likely be coming home shell-shocked, poor and unemployed. This isn't like WWII where basically the entire male population signed up for the war. Our armed services are pretty much made up of the bottom of the barrel, despite all the jingoistic crap that you hear about being the best you can be.

Restoring sound currency and legalizing competing currencies may be our only way out of this mess. Coupled with reduced spending and living in our means, we might be able to right this ship once again. It's probably better to buy gold than to put Federal Reserve notes under your matress. I think gold could easily hit $2000 an ounce once things really start to tank.