Ta-Da! Recession Over. Sadly, Pain is Not

No longer waiting around for the stimulus money to "trickle down" to its citizens, Tennessee decided to put people to work in the fashion of a New Deal works program. The several hundred people in a rural Tennessee county who were laid off when an automobile manufacturing plant went to Mexico, were able to find state jobs in, yes, the unemployment office, working on thinning a forest, and other public works tasks.

And this is good, because despite economists declaring the recession "officially over," the pain of unemployment, lost value in retirement equities, and increasing prices in necessities such as gasoline, are continuing to hit everyone.

We have a long way to go before anyone feels like they are out of the woods. The so-called green job creation may, at it's peak, develop into 2.4 million jobs, a mere drop in the bucket of how many jobs have been lost in this recession, much less how many more need to be created to keep up with the growing work force.

While housing sales are increasing, house values continue to slide. In other words, people are buying, but sellers are losing value with each sale. Most of these sales are excess inventory or subsequent to bank foreclosures.

As the Slate article suggests, don't download Happy Days Are Here Again.