[planet yahoo answers]

...foreclosures and business failures on the rise if recession ended in june 2009? Also the unemployment rate never went down. But recession ended way back in June 2009? There seems to be disconnect here. In the part where I live, things are really very bad economically. Almost all the shops and small businesses have shut their doors

[Baphomantis]

Banksters at it again and Obama is just their puppet.

[name]

because there is strict definition of a recession and (believe it or not) what is going on right now doesnt meet the terms of that definition.

[Schutzstaffel]

Obama lies, americans die.or go broke.

[RockIt]

Many of the economic numbers that get reported don't accurately record the reality associated with booms or busts especially when there is a lot of political pressure to hype good numbers and down play bad numbers.Sometimes, they even invent new metrics??!?Remember, saved jobs, lolAnyone seen a graph of the number of "saved" jobs from Jan 2009 to date?

[NZ territorial waters]

Blame the Republicans as they are the ones who don't want anyone to have money in their pockets to spend except for the super-wealthy. If you have a minimum wage of $15 an hour like in Australia then you wouldn't be in a recession. None of this undemocratic rubbish where you have different wages set in different states. The government is the only one allowed to set a universal minimum wage in NZ and Australia. Work on getting the minimum wage increased and made universal. The more people spending, the better for local businesses. It is the domino effect.Tax cuts for the super wealthy don't work as they just spend it overseas and put it in the bank. The majority of people are low income. There should be no tax on the first $6000 of income; Australia has that policy and their economy is booming.

[Auntie Anne Arkey]

Its all how you manipulate the numbers. I, too, live in an area that is becoming more depressed every day, and our REAL unemployment is at 17%, which will increase dramatically once repatriated soldiers come home. When people who have run out of unemployment benefits, when people have opted for retirement (early or otherwise) in order to survive, when kids who are out of school and simply can't find jobs are NOT part of the unemployment statistics, only an idiot would say we are out of a recession. I take that back...if 1 is good and 10 is bad and 5 equals a recession, then yes, we're out of a recession because we're down to 7 and heading rapidly towards 8.

[Scales of Justice 3]

Simple. Obama was the only one saying it was over. Enough said.

[63vette]

Just Obama and his Administration trying to make themselves look good and we already know he lies."It is Bush's Fault" ............... remember their answers to questions of this type. He still takes no responsibility.

[Armchair Goddess #1]

RIPPLE EFFECT...ever studied that? We have a nation of more than 360 MILLION people that went through eight horrific years of really BAD fiscal policies coupled with the GOP's corporate-colluding DEREGULATION that eliminated all oversight, all consumer protections, and all systems of checks and balances. National Public Radio (NPR) began warning about pending catastrophe with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac way back in 2004. I even held up buying a house until 2007 based on their dire warnings of having the Reaganomics-failed-policies-caused COLLAPSE of our SAVINGS AND LOAN industry being absolutely DWARFED if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed---to the tune of $$TRILLIONS$$ lost over the LONG-TERM! The report then was that market values were being deliberately MANIPULATED and property values were being DELIBERATELY INFLATED to create a false BUBBLE from which investors were making huge profits by betting on eventual collapse. Joshua Picker's (2009) article: "Before the Bush Recession: Supply Side Tax Cuts Failed to Deliver on Jobs and Income Growth Between 2001 and 2007" (the period where right-wing Republicans had control of every single branch of government) is well worth a read. Also, there's the PBS 2008 airing of "FRONTLINE: Inside the Meltdown" that explains the extent of damages and panic. What a lot of Americans do not know is that the Bush/Cheney administration FUDGED the books, keeping war costs off their budget books, using new military recruits as "new hires" in order to have the unemployment figures seem better than was true (OUTSOURCING was SUBSIDIZED by market-manipulating Republicans, so most of our best-paying jobs had moved to third-world countries---same as under Reagan/Bush-Bush/Quayle, if you read Donald Bartlett and James Steele's "America, What Went Wrong?"), and borrowing from Communist China for all their unfunded mandates, which then caused deficit spending to EXPLODE! These bad-policy decisions have long-range repercussions that cannot be fixed overnight. The Great Depression (caused by the very same upside-down and backwards fiscal policies, by the way) lasted from 1929 through 1938, nearly ten years, and in many ways this GOP-caused Great Recession is far worse because of the stagnation in job creation and income growth cited in Picker's article, plus the simultaneous housing and credit markets' collapses that was followed by the entire FINANCIAL SYSTEM MELTDOWN that took the damages GLOBAL---something that has negatively impacted the speed of our recovery. BTW: The employment rate did actually drop in two ways: State-by-state (with more than 25 of our states' rates going below the national average, and only a few (interestingly enough, in mostly right-wing-run states) going up; and by going down the .1%---from 9.1% to 9.0% in the last assessment. We are ON THE RIGHT PATH NOW, but progress is very very slow. If the right-wingers in Congress would pass the American JOBS Act forthwith, this might add a little speed to the short-term and long-term recovery process.