Well Bush, Cheney, Gramm, Greenspan, et al. have finally driven the economy off the cliff. Now it’s up to their Republican croneys to obstruct Obama and the Democrats from accomplishing anything in the next two years so they can make their comeback in 2010.

We all knew we were heading into a rice & beans economy, but now it looks like we are skipping over the moist dogfood economy right into a dry dogfood economy. What I mean by that is it is all we’ll be able to afford to eat. I’m optimistic we won’t be heading into a soylent green economy.

The more I read about the economy and how it got that way it becomes clearer where it is actually heading. The guv’mint has finally admitted we’ve been in a recession since 2007. Actually it’s been in one since 2000. The bubbles that Greenspan helped to create, and the the unregulated financial evironment Phil Gramm helped to create masked that wages have been stagnant for the middle class and that more people were falling into poverty and the lower middle class.

Today I read that unemployment has hit a 34 year high. If I were being optimistic, the government is finally admitting how high unemployment really is and has been for a while. They don’t count the underemployed nor those who’ve given up looking for work or dropped off the unemployment rolls. If I were being pessimistic, they haven’t changed the way they count and the job market is even worse than what they are reporting. You know the economy has to be bad for record number of illegal immigrants to return home.

The sad thing is it doesn’t have to be this way. We have abundant resources. We have a talented labor pool. So the ten trillion dollar question is “How did we allow ourselves to be brought to our knees by parasites who produce nothing?”

Update— DailyKos has a front page story about how the unemployment situation is actually worse than the reported numbers. The author pointed out:

Back in 1994, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics changed how it gauged unemployment, choosing to exclude “discouraged workers.” That means people available and eager to work but who, after a year of looking, have given up because they cannot find a job. The Clinton administration just chopped these discouraged workers out of the most commonly reported statistic on unemployment.

I’m really sick and tired of the way government officials try to paint a rosier picture than things really are. Things aren’t rosy and haven’t been for a long time. We really need transparency back in government and officials need to stop lying.