[Porsche-O-Phile]

Exactly. A true "recovery" cannot occur until jobs have been created and people are re-absorbed into the workplace.

You simply can't sustain an economy trying to drag along the cost of unproductive (economic defintion, not a disparaging remark) individuals.

In this way I'd say any announcement of "recovery" is way premature and conditional on a turnaround in unemployment within a few months of the other indicators - otherwise the "recovery" will stall and probably even reverse.

The GAO statistics are bunk. They do not account for those persons underemployed or who have exhausted their benefits (I know two people personally in that boat). I believe the "real" unemployment number for CA is somewhere around 16%-17% right now. Don't know what it is nationally, but I'd speculate somewhere around 13%-14%. Don't play games with me over the bullschit manipulated statistics used. For practical purposes an "unemployed" person is one with no income coming from working (i.e. not welfare, governement assistance or relatives).

Until we see a couple of consecutive quarters of POSITIVE numbers, this ain't a recovery. That's a real-world, common-sense definition, even if it disagrees with what the ulterior-motivated spin machine statisticians' methodologies say.