Recession -- we thought so!

Dragon Mood? -- a little smug

S and I had a long, thoughtful conversation yesterday about the current state of our lives. She has way too much stress from her job in its current incarnation, along with taking classes as mandated by her employer. I have a job that feels so purposeless that I gain little to no sense of worth and/or contribution from it.

(S has two more classes to go. She will hopefully be done by next June. Then, her employer will bestow on her the god-almighty certificate that they have been dangling out there as a carrot for the past several years. With that certificate, she can take a state-licensing professional engineer's exam and leave this job, if she so desires. I digress.)

Anyway, from our conversation, we concluded that not only are we in a slump, but that the whole country is in a slump. Rather than things getting better, we're just trying to hold on. We're trying to keep our jobs, keep our health insurance coverage, keep our bills paid, and keep our sanity. The proverbial wolves feel like they're circling right outside our door. We concluded that our country is in a RECESSION.

While S and I reach conclusions all the time (the logical result of being fairly opinionated!), it isn't every day that we find one of them validated in a newspaper the very next day:

Here are the numbers, a sober and powerful counter-argument to any declaration that the recession is long over and good times are back for everyone. Poverty is up in the United States for the third consecutive year, the Census Bureau says, with 40 million people now afflicted. Median household income is stagnant at a little more than $43,000 a year. That, after three years of decline and still lower than it was in 1999. And the number of Americans without medical insurance is up, too, as it has been each year since 2001, to 45 million.

Dreary numbers under any circumstances. Only now they come close to the height of the presidential campaign. They carry a significance that should rival what President Bush had to say the same day of the Census Bureau report, that he miscalculated what Iraq would be like after a U.S.-led invasion.

"Because we acted, our economy since last summer has grown at a rate as fast as any in nearly 20 years," Mr. Bush said Thursday. "Since last August, we've added approximately 1.5 million new jobs."

What he didn't say, of course, is that there are fewer jobs, and fewer people working, now than when he took office.

I can't wait to tell S. And, while I feel a bit smug, this article confirms what we have been feeling: we are not feeling secure in our professional lives and our financial circumstances, and things are not getting better.