This guy states it very well. It really does help when you use actual numbers rather than cherry pick one or two, which some of you seem to prefer.
http://www.growthology.org/growthology/2009/06/picturing-unemployment-may-2009.html
June 05, 2009
Picturing Unemployment, May 2009
In May, the U.S. unemployment rate spiked by another half percentage point. Since the recession started in December 2007, the unemployment rate has risen by 4.5 points (correction: earlier post said 4.4). The only episode with recessionary change this big was the 4.5 point increase during the double 1980-82 recessions. This spike in unemployment has been recorded over 17 months, exactly half the time, and number of recessions, needed to cause as much damage then.
We are experiencing the deepest and swiftest recession in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is definitive.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
