[MRM]

This is a serious question and it deserves a serious response. The quick answer is that we are in the trough of a business cycle. The economy is cyclical. Times are good, things turn sour, and times get hard. We've had it so good for most of the last 25 years that this downturn seems particularly bad. Since the early 1980s, we've had some downturns, most notably in 1991-1992 and 2001, but we haven't had many sustained downward slopes on the business cycle curve. Since we are used to sustained good times, any downturn makes it hard to tell the difference between the end of the world and what is simply the end of the good times.

That being said, there are other factors at work that spread pain disproportionately and hit some people and sectors worse than others. To the people being affected, this is not a mere downturn in the business cycle; it is a fundamental shift in the economy that is eliminating what they used to do and it is difficult for people in those positions to find replacement work.

As Len points out, there are entire sectors of the economy that are dead. That would include the state of Michigan and the American auto industry and all the businesses and industries that depend on the auto industry. All businesses are cutting to the bone, so the days of safe, well educated white collar professionals is gone. The companies are cutting staff, managers and executives. The numbers don't tell the whole story for a couple of reasons.

What is different now is 1) that many of the jobs that were lost were high paying professional and skilled blue collar positions; 2) those jobs are not coming back; and 3) the people who had those jobs are not going to get new ones just like the job they lost. The people who have lost jobs or have businesses like Len's that are in declining industries are not in a business cycle. They are like the miners in a boom town that ran out of gold. They are superfluous to American industry.

This is not an entirely new phenomonon. Since the 1990s companies have been cutting middle management, but what is new is that entire industries are downsizing and not coming back. They don't have plans to increase staff even when business picks up. GM, Ford, etc. all have plans to be fully staffed at something like half the size they were a year or two ago.

So, the current economy is putting strains on everyone who buys gas, borrows money or shops for groceries - the real costs of food and energy and consumer loans have gone up. For those people this is the end of the good times. But for a significant minority of people in the country who have lost theor jobs or businesses or are at risk to do so, the end really is here.

To a 50 year old white collar professional with a 25 year job history of increasing management responsibilities with the same company, who finds himself unemployed 24 months before his pension kicked in, there is no diference between today and the Great Depression. My wife's company just created a couple of thousand people just like that. To the rest of us, it's just higher prices and flat wages.