Guess there’s really no reason to massage the numbers any more, right? After all, we got The One we’ve been waiting for for a second time. Which means Utopia is right around the corner, just past that pile of dead and rigored “rich Republicans” stacked like cordwood on the corner of Fair Share Lane and Social Justice Ave.

Bill Wilson, ALG:

Supposedly the recession ended in June 2009, but more than three years later, the economy is still shedding jobs, with 22.4 million who cannot full-time work, and another 5 million who have given up looking all together.

Moreover, labor force participation remains very low at 63.6 percent, as Baby Boomers engage in early retirement and young people fail to enter the workforce. If the labor force participation rate had remained steady at the 65.7 percent level when Obama entered office, today’s unemployment rate would have come in at 10.7 percent, and the underemployed rate at 17 percent. This is a depression. We’re still dead in the water.

This, despite trillions of dollars fiscal and monetary ‘stimulus’ by the government that was supposed to get the economy back on track.

The American people have every right to be outraged at this pathetic performance, and now it is time for Congress to chart a new course. With the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, a sinking dollar, and a regulatory environment that would make Soviet Russia blush, the U.S. is rapidly becoming a terrible place to do business.

Unless the cost of doing business here can be reduced, through lower taxation, reining in new health care, labor, and environmental regulations, and sound money, a robust economic recovery will continue to [elude] policy makers.

I’m going to have to disagree with Mr Wilson’s conclusion here:  nothing is eluding policy makers.  Instead, the New Left “progressives” are doing what they want to do — create a dependency nation and a stronger, more powerful centralized government set to parlay every crisis it creates into an excuse to find a new governmental “solution” (a command and control economy is next, I bet; to take on the “profiteers” responsible for your smaller paycheck) — while the GOP is doing what it does best:  throw up its hands, complain that it has no leverage to operate, and ultimately, after some theater and, selling out its base while enjoying all the perks of being in a big powerful federal government.

After which it will send out fund raising letters imploring us to help them defeat the Democrats.

Newsflash:  Boehner, who was just re-elected as speaker (thanks in part to the vote of TEA Party caucus leader Michele Bachmann), caucused with many Dems to raise tax rates.  The game is over.  And it is us, not the politicians, who got played and then rolled.

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update:  math.