Consumers are charging more for the first time since 2008… Car sales are up… The unemployment rate is down but less than 40,000 jobs were created last month when we need more like 150,000 monthly new hires just to keep up with population gains. As a result, more people disappear into a chronically unemployed limbo… Real estate deals are increasing and apartment rents rise in some markets with declining vacancies… But that’s partly a consequence of enduring housing market distress where only cash buyers offer any ballast in a market where most people can’t afford bargain basement prices without ample mortgages that chastened lenders refuse (maybe wisely) to provide… And we’re told corporate America sits on $2 trillion in cash—they won’t hire because they don’t see demand, but with so many people out of work where will the demand come from if the hiring engine isn’t stoked?

Then we have the dismal government scene. Decades of overborrowing at the Federal level combine with decades of unsustainable labor deals at the state and local level to create a sudden maelstrom of necessary cutbacks and re-ordered priorities, which will play out over the next few years. You find egregious examples of over-reaching everywhere—one third of Nassau County (NY) employees make over $100,000 a year and that’s not counting pension and medical benefits now unattainable in most private sector jobs. Then there is the mayor in the California community of 40,000 who paid himself more than $1 million a year. Suburban folks who wonder why their property taxes are so high should examine the patchwork of local governments and school districts—each with their own expensive overlapping bureaucracies.

But reducing the number of government jobs and scotching government grants and contracts to private employers will only keep upward pressure on unemployment. Reduced public employee pension benefits ultimately will force more ageing Americans back into the labor market to help make ends meet or else many more seniors will be forced to retrench—move back in with their children or downscale lifestyles drastically in other ways.