Swine (sorry pork producers) flu may be abating at least for now, the stress tests don't break bankers into too much of a sweat, and the car companies will survive, if barely (did we have any doubts?). A few U.S. companies scramble to make solar panels but we ceded most of that product's manufacturing overseas in the 1990s. And the market here remains suspect. There are wind turbines, but the whole wind energy thing hasn't gotten off the ground yet. Some people (mostly in West Virginia ) pin their hopes for electricity production on the ludicrous proposition of "clean coal." The President talks about bringing back securitization with proper regulation (in the New York Times Magazine), but the new world order for the financial industry likely means restrictions which will reduce transaction volumes and the fees that go with them. Whether we get health care reform or not, doctors complain they can't make a living. The web is wiping out newspapers and magazines, while shrinking other media companies. And many of the other jobs in our country are brokers, accountants, lawyers and various intermediaries, which feed off of transactions and benefit from complicated tax codes which normal people can't understand and which actually create considerable inefficiencies.

Competing economies, meanwhile, can produce what we do for less (much less)--workers' compensation and benefits, space costs increase in places like China, Brazil and India, but are far below here in the U.S.

It's not a pretty picture especially when you consider that many people, companies, and of course our banks are up to their necks in credit problems.

The long-term trend lines suggest that the vaunted American standard of living is in for unavoidable decline unless we produce something that the rest of the world needs, wants, and can't produce itself. The car companies have been the leading edge of this unfortunate turn. We've had an advantage on the tech and bio tech fronts, but its eroding as many of our brightest went to Wall Street instead of into engineering and medical fields. And financial acumen of the sort that created our recent debacle won't be in great demand over the near term.

We'll start to see a long overdue shift in graduate degrees away from finance, business and law into science, tech and engineering. But will the rigor improve enough in our public school systems to feed demand for the high caliber demand required in science and tech fields? In the meantime, the jobs outlook appears less than robust unless you can latch onto some government contract work in defense or infrastructure. As a result, there won't be a big rush to fill empty office space or push up housing prices--once we reach a bottom.

But it could be worse--you could be in the travel agency business, specializing in vacation packages to Mexico.