I'm fully employed, yet rising costs (food, fuel) are womping on me.

How the heck are you paying the mortgage/rent and groceries without employment? That's a good trick I'd not mind learning.

My guess? He makes money off of all the John McCain ads on the site. Plus welfare, unemployment, social security, and food stamps.

[Government don't give me nothing. I make money off the site, and my wife is employed. -Ed.]

I'm doing ok.
The 530-mile/week commute to work is getting rather pricey though....

Things stink for me, filling the Bentley costs so much I usually just take the Lamborgini and have you seen the prices of arugula? The other day I actually had romaine lettuce in my salad.
Well, I fired Cook over that, but still....

Everything sucks. Once the snow melts I'm going to drive into the woods to see if that old abandoned cabin has been torn down by the Forest Service yet. If it's still there, I'm going to go there and hide for the 7 years it takes for all the crap to fall off my credit report. Maybe I'll bring some weak-willed children of liberals with me and start a cult or something, 'cuz I'll need some followers to go into town to buy ammo and nachos. The End is Nigh.

I've never been better. It's only a recession because a Republican's in office in this election year, and the media doesn't want another one to replace him. Never mind the fact that we're doing better than we were Bubba's last year in office. Funny that we never heard a peep then...

It's been great since I moved back to TX! Tampa sucks though (although people seem to be doing alright).

Things seem basically normal down here in Houston. The only thing that's changed is the amount of time spent complaining about gas prices. But I figure if I still can't get a table at 7pm on a Friday night, people don't have too much to complain about. ;)

Things in Reno are shaky. Literally and figurtively. The housing market has tanked. My house lost about 35% of its value in 2 1/2 years. Lucky for me the value of it doubled the 2 1/2 years before that. But so many people here are upside down by 50-100k in their houses that they are stuck. Plus we've had about 200 earthquakes in the past week, so a lot of peoples houses that they can't afford and are upside down in have been damaged by seismic forces.

So yeah, things are kind of shaky.

My son and I operate a handyman company. Despite the housing crisis the Home Depot Parking lots around here (San Jose)are always full of contractor vehicles every morning. I haven't been that busy, but we're still a new company; building a reputation and a client base takes time.

John McCain said a two months ago that the recession was all in people's head. Now you’re saying John McCain was right about the economy??? But he hasn't ever been right about anything other than the war.

ARGG!!! MY WORLD NO LONGER MAKES SENCE!! I need my bible and my Glock.

I don't see recession here, but I do sense stagnation, mostly due to rising gas/food prices offsetting gains elsewhere. What does worry me, being in commercial construction, is that work is running pretty thin, at least in the eastern part of the state. And construction is often a precursor to the rest of the economy. But I'm doing fine. I also don't have to pay for my gas :P

But things go up and down. You can't convince a liberal of that, though. The slightest down is, of course, the collapse of humanity...

I'm doing fine. My industry (industrial process engineering) is still experiencing major shortages in manpower, so my employment is looking good for a while.

Why is it that low housing prices = evil and low gas prices = good? I want to buy a house. Now I may actually be able to.

Things are getting tighter in greater Pugetopolis, premium gasoline now at $3.97 in our neck of the woods. Bonus is that our yard is big enough for a serious victory (or should that be "defeat"?) garden, and by engaging in some really simple water conservation, we have massively dropped our utility bills. But if the job goes away, I can always volunteer for a deployment in an O-1 zone, and make nearly triple the money I am now. (not like I haven't already done that four or five or six times...)

Things Blow Chunks here in Minnesota (that’s tech speak for us IT guys)! The ice just went out of Lake Minnetonka 1.5 weeks ago and we have some Homo named Franken running for the Senate? Sigh…

As my name suggests, I'm way up north in ND. The economy here is booming. In the eastern part of the state, we rely mostly on agriculture....if the farmers are happy, the rest of our economy booms. Out west, they just released info of the discovery of the equivalent of several billion barrels of black gold...(I hear we might have to share with SD, MT, and a bit of Canada but I say whoever gets there first, gets the most!!) so the economy should be booming out there pretty soon too. The only thing they need out west is rain...(well, another refinery wouldn't hurt either) I hear it's pretty dry though my husband and his (bitter)hunting buddies filled out on pheasants in 45 minutes so the "dry" hasn't affected the wildlife yet... We're toying with the idea of building a new house to take advantage of the great mortgage rates, so yeah, we're doing okay. I think the only ones yelling "the sky is falling" are the dhimmies and the lame stream media...oops, that's redundant isn't it?!

I know a lot of old small business owners, guys who have owned small businesses over a span of decades. They all say the same thing. Every election year, the economy slows, because people are scared and they are waiting until after November to spend their money. If a republican is in office, then the news will report this natural even as a recession, just like they did in 1992, 1988, 1984, 1976, and so on. They did not do so as much in 2004, because they were too busy attacking the war. These calls of wolf cause more panic, making people more scared, and less likely to spend money. After November, people start spending all the money they herded, and things get better. If a democrat wins, he will receive credit, even if the press has to suppress the news for a few months, and the guy has only been in office a day or so.

Here amidst the "abject poor of Essex County in New York" things haven t changed since Mario Cuomo uttered those words in 1984. With the exception of the fur trade being gone, and logging being less profitable. Oh yea - and property taxes quadrupling the past few years, things are just peachy.

I have been unemployed for about seven months. I finally landed a job making a little more money than before, but I will have to relocate, which sucks.

I have noticed that employers are being very selective and taking months to fill positions. They are taking a wait and see approach or making due with the people they have until business picks up.

Or I could be kidding myself, and I am just a tool who can't find a job.

My office is so busy we can barely keep up (EMC and electrical safety testing). The housing industry bubble is deflating to where it should be, and thereby temporarily dragging a few other industries down with it. If we could just send congress on vacation for 51.9 weeks a year, our economy would be golden.

My job's been rendered largely useless because my employer was bought out, but they have no plans to fire me soon so I spend much of my day surfing the web and visiting humor web sites.

Dave, one of my favorites is hotchickswithdouchebags.com

Had no idea you were a local. What's your field? I might have some contacts for you.

Bill -- Frank does computer programming.

I'd say that you should buy more crucial memory and lexar smartcards to support Frank, but that'd be tooting my own horn far more. However, if Micron weren't in such a long-running money-losing funk (their own sort of "recession"), Frank'd probably be golden in Boise.

Micron is doing some hiring. . . temporary workers for tech's. About the only good thing there is that you can interview with a former marine.

I start a new full-time job tomorrow. I am going to make double this year what I made last year. Yay me! I guess I had better save up, in case the demotakes take office and thereafter all my money.

Lets see here in Lafayette Indiana it depends on who you ask. The county assessor says my house has appreciated $5K in the last year! Of course the mortgage company had sent a letter that arrived 1 day before the assessment saying they were cutting the home equity credit limit from $20K to $10K cause the value of the house had dropped.

I don't care cause I don't use the home equity line of credit (took it out to avoid PMI cause of a 10 day gap between the closing on the old house and the new one) but I loved the juxtapositional irony of the letters.

I threaten to kill people for a living (security) and although business has been good I haven't gotten a raise in 9 years. On the plus side my neighborhood is going downhill so fast that my property tax has actually gone down as the value of my house has plunged. Maybe I'll move to ND.

Well, I'm a stay-at-home mom with an in-home daycare, and my husband is a pastor, so we don't know too much about the economy here in rural MN.
But it certainly can't be good when I go to Walmart in a suburb of Minneapolis and most of the employees (not kidding - at least 75% of them) are Somalian Muslim women dressed in hijabs and traditional garb. So, yeah, ussjimmycarter (#15) is right with the Al Franken thing - things aren't going to get better if that gets into office.

Well, things here in NYC never seem to go my way, but that's usually my own fault. However, Frank - I only hope you've spent more time proofreading your resume than your posts. Seriously - it shows an inattention to detail that kills...

We're in So. Cal (San Diego) and things are going well (thank God!) My husband is a systems engineer. He designs/maintains data centers (whatever that means!) But seriously, I feel very blessed to be a stay at home mom. Homeschooling isn't cheap (we reap none of the benefits of our tax $ to the public schools). Of course this is entirely by choice - CA schools are crazy liberal! Gas/food are expensive here, we know lots of folks in construction who don't have work, but thankfully our houses have not depreciated (although LOTS of foreclosures around here!)

Tamaita, I stopped into a McDonad's in Eagan where I'm currently doing a consulting gig last week and thought I had stepped into Mexico! Every employee in the joint was from Mexico and the guy at the counter could barely speak english. Everyone else was speaking Spanish. I thought that was interesting...

//Things Blow Chunks here in Minnesota (that’s tech speak for us IT guys)! The ice just went out of Lake Minnetonka 1.5 weeks ago and we have some Homo named Franken running for the Senate? Sigh…

#15 - Posted by: ussjimmycarter on April 30, 2008 04:18 PM//

Jimmy!! Move, hurry, come to Arizona!!! house prices are down and everybody knows how to use a sidearm!!! Quick before the socialists get you and turn you into a reaver!!!

My business is very good. Hot chicks chase after me, too.

Dang, unemployment sucks. So does under-employment for that matter. Come to think of it, most employment is just wage slavery anyway.

I would have thought the market for hippy-punching would be red hot right now, considering that there are still too many hippies out there needing punching.

A perfect world, in general, would be everyone spending their days "working" at their true talents and passions, with enough passive income on the side to meet their needs. If anyone figures out how to make that happen, let the rest of us know.

The economy is fine. You'll know things are actually bad when people have to stop paying for cable TV so they can afford food... or they could just go to prison and get both for free.
I'm only afraid that one of the communists will get elected and cancel all the defense contracts, then it's goodbye to my short lived career.

While you've got free time, why not run for office?

Well, the dinosaur media seems so eager to have a recession, it might be rude of me to admit I'm doing fine.

What bothers me most about higher gas prices is the guys who work for the gas station with very big guns who stop cars on the street and force them to come into the gas station and buy high-priced gas. That's not nice!

UssJimmy[as hard as I try, I just cannot type that last part of your name...sorry]:

I am tech guy in MN and my economy is doing pretty good. (I do most of my work out of the state though.) The problem comes in when I return to MN on the weekends and the evil State confiscates whatever profit I earned Mon-Fri!