I stand by my statement as a matter of statistics. There's no question that deviations from the average are to be expected. But the greater the deviation, the less likely it is to occur. Since 1970 only one year (1984) had real US GDP growth in excess of 7%. The economic growth in the US in 2010 (2.5%) is not so different as the first year recovery from the tech bust in 2003 (2.8%).
The 2003 recession was really a recession with a small r.
It cannot be understated how much we lost during the 2008-09 crash, which I believe many people who predict we're due for a recession are doing.
Here is a quick spreadsheet I made, which extrapolates if we maintained 2.5% annual GDP growth (a reasonable number), after the year 1999--which was a year of full employment, peace, and ideally the US economy's potential. As you can see, even with the dotcom bubble recession, we more or less maintained this prosperity level, but after the 2008 crash
we completely fell off the wagon.The economy is running well under $1 trillion GDP short of it's potential. The idea of us going through another recession any time soon is nuts. There's too much capital and human potential still sitting out there.
Recessions happen because they need to happen not because some arbitrary period of time has passed.