“So clearly, we’re digging ourselves out of a hole,” Dougherty said.
Dougherty said the United States lost more than 22 million jobs during the depths of the downturn caused by the pandemic, about half of which have been recovered at this point. Spending on services remains well below where it stood before the virus began to spread.
Even if GDP does grow by about 5% in each of the next two years, as Dougherty predicts, it still won’t put the country’s GDP back on pre-pandemic rate of growth until 2022 or 2023, he said.
“We’re certainly not back to where we were at the start of 2020,” Dougherty said.