The designation of a recession truly means that the majority of our country is facing a terrible economy. Even though we’ve had “non-recession” quarters, our economy hasn’t been firing on all cylinders for a couple of years. Basically, you can track the slowing economy with the rising gas costs. Correlation or coincidence? I’m putting my money on a strong correlation. Now that the economy has stuttered and the stock market slashed, fuel costs have returned to normal… because consumer demand has drastically reduced.

In the area that I live in, 214 of the 218 homes that have been sold this year have been foreclosures. This is a very serious concern even if it don’t fit into someones classification of a recession.

Just like I don’t need a weatherman to tell me if it is raining outside, I don’t need statistics to tell me when times are bad. People manipulate numbers every day, to make money or to hide money for any number of reasons.

Mark Twain was a very intelligent man and lots of good common sense.

As for the economy being bad prior to the actual negative GDP numbers, the country was in fact heading towards recession with many economic indicators pointing downward and falling near zero. Depending on which state, city, or job market you were in, you could have been experiencing the downturn much sooner than even December 2007.

Generally people are economically illiterate just as they are politically illiterate and common sense illiterate. Numbers are a good factual point of view, but they cannot be the only things we hang our hats on. The first thing I was taught about numbers is that they lie.

Mark Twain so eloquently stated, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, and since the fourth quarter hasn’t ended yet, we won’t know for a fact that we’re in a recession until January of 2009.

While I have little doubt that an assessment of the fourth quarter will show that we are indeed in a recession, it did not begin until July of 2008.

As for the average citizen believing that the economy was bad prior to this past summer, all I can tell you is that the majority of people I talk to are economic illiterates. Most people thought the economy was in trouble following Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005, due primarily to the high cost of oil and gasoline, not because American GDP actually stopped growing.

Some folks have been warning of an imminent recession since Bush first took office, and for purely political reasons have been talking both he and it down ever since. I prefer to simply let the facts speak for themselves.