Do you think the economy is getting better?

No. Things are getting worse for me and people I know.

NO

Yes, things are better insofar as they've stopped getting worse, but I haven't been affected positively yet. Of course it took a long time for the bad economy to reach too, so the next year or so is gonna be rough. But big picture wise, yeah.

I have some investments in the stock market (index funds) which had dropped a lot, but they have recovered a fair bit.
Also, advertising revenue for my website had gone down very low for several months in 2009, but it has come back up some recently.
In both cases, it's not where it was, but it's better and I'm not as screwed as I had been.

Things seem about the same. Overall things are relatively stable right now, but they're not improving. Unemployment is still high. Only the bankers who caused the recession think it's over, now that they've paid back their bailout loans and gotten their bonuses.

No, except my 401k is starting to climb again instead of sinking.

I got a small raise this year, but with increased federal and state taxes and medical premiums I actually take home less per paycheck now than last year. Hell, I though teveryone was getting a tax break from Obama in their paychecks. My company is withholding $30 a paycheck more than last year.

Companies in the Bay area are still laying off a lot of people and I still see stores closing down. Hell, one company actually laid off 325 people on frickin' Christmas Day. That's pretty low.

My oldest son hasn't had work in 3 years and the younger one has a hard time keeping a job more than six months because the companies keep laying him off and bringing on brain dead zombies who will work for less money.

Who knows even the so called experts, the economist, can't agree on it's condition so how am I suppose to know

Yes some things are better

Everything is still expensive, so not at the moment.

In Australia the economy never went into recession, but it did slow a bit and is now picking up again.

I never experienced any negative effects in the first place.

Did you even notice the higher grocery bills? It's harder for us to keep food well stocked lately. After we get our tax refund, we'll pay off my truck and have $340 extra a month. yeah!

Bush made things bad and the Obamao and his gang of idiot Socialists have made it much worse.

No, I didn't notice them.

Well, I am employed. So they're going good for me.

Nationwide: Unemployment is going down (slowly). Inflation is going up (slowly). Both of these things are because of Obama's policies, one of them is bad, one of them is good. So it evens out.

As for Wall Street, who cares what those fudgeers think. They figured out how to play the system so that things will be good for them no matter what.

Obama is spending to much money, people need a tax break.

That's my impression. I wasn't listening to the pundits, I just came up with it all by myself.

Same old thing.

The economy is a fiction which comes down to 'Consumer confidence'. There's no reason people couldn't hire, produce, and buy as before.

A huge problem with our economy though is that it is a combination of monopolization, automation, and pyramid scheme. If we just stuck to the same old goods, eventually everyone would work for, and buy from a single company which automates everyone out of work. The only way to perpetuate such a system is for everyone to collectively own the machine which produces their goods, since they wouldn't have jobs. However, because we still live with work ethics from the early mercantilism form of capitalism, and believe everyone must earn their own way, without seeing the end-game repurcussions of pyramid monopoly automation, we keep inventing new types of products and services at the same rate that the top of the pyramid absorbs them.

In theory we could just halt progress and live at our prior standard of living without having to work much at all, but instead we run a constant rat-race to invent work faster than it can be automated &/or monopolized.

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Our money too is rather fictional. It's printed from nowhere and doesn't represent wealth at all. In fact it's the very opposite. It's the degree of our national debt which reflects how productive we have been. Money is issued with interest which eventually exceeds the value of the money n the first place. When it is issued it becomes a game of musical chairs to determine who gets some material value from the money and who gets stuck working off the interest.

In theory, with all the compound interest that was ever issued by the Federal Reserve, the FR owns everything ever produced with money. They are a private company, and not even our US Congressmen know their identity. JFK wanted to dismantle the FR and create a government issued currency instead, and we saw what happaned to him. LBJ's first major act was to fully restore the FR.

All told though, the FR system seems to work just fine anyhow. It's owners may own us all in theory, but in practice have chosen to remain invisible and not go buying up countries and such. I have the counter-conspiracy theory that they don't really even exist; That the US Gov't actually does run the FR, and simply destroys all the money paid back to it to keep the economy properly regulated.

Take a look at the bailing out of the banks. Trillions of dollars issued from nowhere. What in effect has happened is that the country went bankrupt; we may not have issued money for new loans, but we did compensate the banks for all the past credit they issued that will never be recovered as millions of individuals declare bankruptcy; and lastly, this unleashing of mammoth amounts of currency injected into the system creates a recession in which our money is now worth only half as much as it was before and people will have to work more before money can again represent the material wealth we have produced.

During this period people have to tighten their belts and buy less food and energy. This isn't really because of the economy, but because proportionally those commodities have become more scarce, and we simply won't be able to heat our homes like we used to no matter how the national financial picture looks. This will improve however the more we invest in wind and solar-steam farms.

Those of you who paid attention to my rants here a dozen years ago will observe that I was saying for years that we were heading for a bankruptcy collapse just like the one which tore apart the USSR, and that such a collapse came down more to 'Consumer confidence' than anything tangible. The USSR lost all consumer confidence. We did indeed go through the same bankruptcy, but we sailed through it rather smoothly because we managed to maintain our faith in American currency even after the collapse.

In order to keep our economy regulated however, we have to keep inventing preposterous mammoth national expenses like bailing out the banks and spending $400 per load of laundry in Iraq. Our money would quickly become meaningless if it were allowed to circulate in local physical economies, much like the wheel barrows of Marks to buy a loaf of bread in 1930's Germany.

There are two systems at play here, physical reality and economic fiction. The two affect each other, but it is a mistake to imagine that they actually represent each other. That hasn't been the case for almost a century now, since the FR was formed (or even earlier to a lessor extent with centuries of banks issuing unbacked loan notes).

Another helpful way of understanding ecenomy is to see the difference between big power money and street money. Street money has tangible value, bread and bicycles, and the sweat of one's brow. Big money, the sort which buys and sells corporations and nations, does not have tangible value. It determines who in theory owns labor and bulk commodities, but not in practice where it is actually performed and consumed. If big money were to flood the local street economy to actually buy bread and bicycles for immediate consumption, the system would fall apart. Big money, acquired from utility payments and such, just like paying off the national debt, is a means of taxation to pull money out of the local street economies at the rate it is injected, such that the local economy maintains consistent dollar value.

If half of your money now goes to credit cards and utility bills, don't imagine that you could buy twice as many consumer goods by not paying those bills. If people had that kind of increased local currency, the prices of consumer goods would go up to match.

The best way to understand our physical economy is to pretend that money doesn't even exist at all, and to simply look at the nation in terms of products, services, and consumption. Money isn't really going to change any of that. It's more like just along for the ride. It does however affect 'who' works and 'who' buys. A large segment of our population is known as the investor class. They play the money market such that they are the ones buying rather than working. They understand the separation between physical fact and economic fiction. It's the people who still imagine that one reflects the other who get screwed working for a living.

We were headed for this sort of bankruptcy collapse since the mid 60's when the average white-collar employee became a speculator/investor. Bush merely shifted who won the game of musical chairs at the end of the song, and Obama just put the record back on. We've done nothing to prevent the causes, and likely we shall see more of these collapses at an increasing rate unless we can create some form of stable socialism which isolates the physical economy from the virtual economy of Wall Street.

You must just buy the items they made smaller instead of the ones they increased the price on. Working in a retail setting I notice most of the packaging becoming smaller instead of increased prices.

I was at the mall yesterday and it took us forever to even find a parking spot. There is NO problem with the economy.

No, I just don't pay close attention to the grocery bill.

I don't really know. I have a bad feeling that it is going to get worse. From what I can see, all the government has done to try and fix the problem is to print more money and bail out companies that haven't shown themselves to be still competitive. They have not really addressed the root causes of the issue. They have just put temporary fixes on the problem. I don't know if many of you have heard of Peter Schiff or Ron Paul but you should check out what they have to say about all of this one Youtube.