It’s not just experts in the private sector who think the economy is years away from full recovery. The Obama administration feels the same way, says White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

“This is going to take an enormous amount of time,” he said in a recent press conference. “No one in this administration ever said that this was going to be easy or that it wouldn’t take some time.”

Asked what constitutes an enormous amount of time, Gibbs said, “I think it’s going to take several years.”

The numbers certainly bear out that thought. Economic growth stumbled to 1.6 percent in the second quarter from the first, and some economists expect an even lower figure for the third quarter.

“I think getting through a recession as deep as the one that we were faced with, the sheer amount of job loss, the shock to the system, shock to our financial system, the change in our housing market (will be difficult),” Gibb said.

“If you look at what happened and what cascaded downward all at a certain period of time, you’re dealing with sort of the perfect storm.”

Goldman Sachs economist Alec Phillips says a failure to extend the Bush tax cuts will make the recovery take even longer.

If the tax cuts disappear, that “would essentially wipe out most of the modest growth we expect in the first half of 2011,” he wrote in a research note obtained by Bloomberg.