4 Ways You Can Tell the Economy Still Sucks

There has never been and will never be a depression so bad that businesses can't come up with a listing:

"Fortune 500 company seeks energetic individual to assist in cutting costs and reducing overhead by ... murdering half our employees."

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"Says here you must be proficient in wielding blunt instruments and Microsoft Excel."

Or sometimes they'll combine two jobs in the hopes of hiring one new guy to replace two older employees, even if the jobs have nothing to do with each other:

"Seeking Industrial Chemist/Panini Chef. Must be able to synthesize complex chemical compounds and make those adorable little sandwiches we like for the company picnic."

Creating jobs and sustainable careers is the hard part. Listing jobs is easy, and any close review of what's really being offered (or not offered) tells you far more about the economy than the number of entries on Monster.com.

For example, when I was a kid, you could make at least two full sandwiches from a can of tuna and have extra left over for some crackers. Today?

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Pictured above: parent feeding child a full can of tuna.

So I guess my point is that politicians can point to their pie charts in an attempt to prove that the economy is on the mend, but odds are that pie no longer feeds a family of five.

Politicians call that the "middle-class squeeze," and that's about all they have to say about it, because they have nothing to offer. Instead, they stress their policy at the extremes. Republicans push for tax breaks for the very rich, while Obama comes forth with a plan to increase the minimum wage for the very poor.

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"And cleaner streets for the homeless!"

A riot of the disenfranchised is brewing. More middle-class Democrats will soon not forgive Obama's minimum wage rhetoric just because he says the right things about gays and women's reproductive rights. An increasing number of middle-class Republicans will stop accepting that their party pushes tax breaks they're not rich enough to receive simply because the GOP is better friends with Jesus. People are getting fed up, and if there's a middle-class squeeze, it's because most of the hard-working Democratic and Republican voters are being shoved together in a desperate attempt to avoid the crap their parties are spewing at the extremes.

No, people are not getting better. People are getting more scared. People are realizing that the system is broken. Maybe it was always a lie, but it used to be a lot easier to shake your head at failures and say, That could never be me. That guy with no house and no money ... he must be lazy or stupid. He must have embezzled or abused drugs. There must be a reason he has nothing. But more and more today, we see people with two degrees and no money. We see people who undertook student loan debt, leveraging their future for jobs that simply don't exist to pay off that debt. We see white-collar professionals nickel and dimed into blue-collar existences. There are good people who've lost their homes and self-respect. The world has gotten so hard for so many that we know it can happen to us.

If Americans are less scared by the notions of bigger government and taxes providing safety nets against the abuses of capitalism, it's not because we care more about our neighbors. It's because we're scared for ourselves. These days, being taxed for social programs seems a lot more like purchasing an insurance policy for the day you draw the short straw in a rigged game. But that might look like human compassion, and I can see why my friend was confused. In any event, you'll know that the economy's actually getting better when everyday Americans start dumping on the poor again.

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