The Recession Has Ended - Yeah!!!

"Poverty was a wonderful thing everyone enjoyed, we were eating grass - not smoking it, wasn't like this when I was a boy, wasn't like this when I was a boy"!  Ian Hunter's tongue -in-cheek poke at what it was like to be poor in an earlier time, when so many were just hanging on but oddly accepting of this fate.   The "this" is, of course, the economically advanced times of today where we are still eating the grass only it's been processed through a cow first.  So many things are different, as Ian points out in the rest of the song.  But the poverty difference, the poverty now versus then, is somehow dark and growing darker.  For many in poverty today were once the smokers, not the eaters, and they are less able to game the public assistance system as the White's of West Virginia have done for generations, living off social security disability for simply being certifiably crazy.
Consider......  In July 2008, the cost of living for Americans hit an all-time high.  It then receded a bit with the Great Recession and just repeated in February 2011.  This isn't a measure of inflation, which tracks the rise in wholesale costs of all kinds of shit many people never spend money on.  This is simply what it costs to live - food, shelter, gas, clothes, etc.  Millions of us are falling into poverty from what was once higher ground despite the fact we have jobs.  College tuition increased 63% in Arizona in the last 3 years.  Medical costs are through the roof and unsustainable.  For the unemployed, it's foreclosure and bankruptcy and then what the hell happens to these people?  Moving in with friends/family?  Homelessness?   Suicide?
This recession is far from over.  The middle class of America is on the endangered list.   The trickle down idea of Reaganomics is a miserable failure as the rich didn't allow it to trickle, but rather invested their windfall in real estate, boats, planes, you name it.   To keep the trickle moving sideways, companies swallowed each other up through leveraged (borrowed) money buy-outs, shedding millions of jobs in the process but concentrating borrowed wealth in the hands of the top dogs and their deal-makers.   Sometimes the new companies were run into the ground (Harry and Davids) due to the suffocating debt, then put into bankruptcy and everyone laid off.  The owners walked unscathed with all the loot.  Or the debt load was too much for shareholders who demand constant and ever increasing profitability, resulting in lay-offs to cut costs or sending production overseas where people will work for pennies.  
For a while, the middle-class soldiered on by borrowing.  The great debt binge of the last decade allowed people to maintain a lifestyle sold to them by mass-marketing consumption, even as their wages and buying power plummeted.   Now, for many, poverty looms only they've already smoked the grass, and quite enjoyed the experience.   What then will bring about a better, brighter and higher day for so many who have inhaled?  Next week, after viewing a movie that opens in a few days, I will offer an idea to consider.  Right now, however, I need to go smoke some grass.