If you are relying on the media or politicians to tell you when the "recession" will be over, you have a right to feel confused. One day it’s a story or pronouncement about the "green shoots" sprouting up in the economy, only to have those "green shoots" trampled the next day by gloom-and-doom over bad retails sales or higher unemployment numbers. So, what to make of all this? Are we being fed information by dumb people or duplicitous people?

   People trying to read the tea leaves of economic activity are missing the big picture because it seems to me that no one wants to utter a basic truth: workers have been knocked down a big peg lower from which they will not climb back, absent some very radical changes in economic rules.

   Example: we can’t have a serious discussion about work in America if people keep talking about the 9.5 percent unemployment rate. It’s almost double that number at over 16 percent–if you take into account all the people who have given up looking for work because they can’t find full-time paid work and those who are only working part-time but need full-time work. "Unemployment" has to mean "not having a job that pays basic bills". If you grasp that fact, then, we can understand what a long road it is going to be before we get back to "recovery".

   You can’t talk about "recovery" until you are willing to grasp a fundamental point: the financial mess we are in is the end result not solely of the greed and incompetence on Wall Street and the banking and real estate industries over the past few years. In fact, that greed and incompetence is only a symptom. Of what? Of an assault on wages that goes back three decades. Productivity has risen steadily over 30 years but wages have been flat.

   Which meant people were borrowing the American Dream, not owning whatever version of the Dream they believed in. And it wasn’t reckless consumption that they were trying to finance–it was the basics of living, from gas, good, rent, school for the kids and health care costs. Now, credit is gone. Poof.

   And retirement? Forget about it. As I mentioned recently, we are facing decades of crisis when it comes to retirement. So, don’t talk to me about "recovery" until we face that truth.

   Which brings me to the debate about whether the president’s stimulus plan was too small. I argued that it was, as did people far smarter than me. But, "stimulus" is what it is: something that is an external shot-in-the-arm but, utlimately, short-term–you can’t stimulate forever from the outside, as it were.

   The only way we get a long-term boost of energy for the economy is when we finally come to realize that "the economy" is not just facts and figures about stuff being made but real peoples’ lives. If you tell me that we are in a "recovery" because the Gross Domestic Product is not dropping anymore, I still don’t feel any better if it’s not clear that the overwhelming numbers of real people are more secure and not worrying every day about getting by.

   And that day is not going to come soon.

   Unless.

   Unless we have a serious discussion about, among other things, poverty, about the scandal of the minimum wage, about why our political leaders are too afraid to send the health insurance industry packing, about the insanity of a trade policy based on hammering down wages around the globe, and about the unbelievable spectacle of states and cities disintegrating because we won’t reinstitute a progressive tax system.