I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the ability of government statistics, economists and prognosticators–pretending to be in the last cateogry myself sometimes–to accurately portray what is actually happening to people. Government stats like Gross Domestic Product don’t tell you much other than stuff is being made–it doesn’t really give you a good picture about how average people are doing, particularly when it comes to showing where wealth is going.

   So, it’s a bit amusing to watch the brilliant economists try to figure out whether we are officially in a recession, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

The figures indicate a recession under the most common definition — two straight quarters of declining GDP — didn’t occur in the first half of this year, though the government could revise the data later.

But the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, which decides whether the U.S. has slipped into a recession, looks for "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months."

   Who gives a rat’s ass? Really. People are losing their homes, they are stretched to the max because now their home values have declined so there isn’t any cash to be found to make up for pathetic wage increases that haven’t kept pace with productivity for years, you can’t go to the gas pump without hauling along a bank loan which you can’t get because banks are collapsing and won’t lend out money, companies are cutting jobs like crazy and won’t expand because they can’t get credit…

   It’s clear that workers’ laboring harder than ever are keeping the numbers up:

Boosting the economy are continued productivity gains. When employers get more from each worker, output can rise even as the number of jobs declines. But the productivity gains may not last long enough to keep growth positive.

  That seems to me the most ironic part of the story: workers are sweating even harder and propping up the economic numbers, even as fewer people have jobs.

   What exactly are these eggheads waiting for? It seems to me that their declarations are more irrelevant than ever and behind the times. Get a real job.