EconomistMom.com

I was blissfully oblivious to all the bad economic news that came out today, until this evening when I got to read and watch the news…  Wow.

The unemployment spike is especially troubling, and now five straight months of job losses.  And then there’s the price of oil and, gee, the stock market pretty much freaked out today, didn’t it?  Maybe we really are in a recession, after all…  Economists keep changing their minds about this, and any official call from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) doesn’t typically come until after the recession’s over.  Want to know more?  Go visit the NBER’s business cycle dating page (…sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?).

I spent the day driving to Pittsburgh for the first day of a yoga conference (I’m a yoga teacher in one of my other lives), so instead of fretting about today’s bad economic news, I was getting in touch with my inner self.  Then tomorrow I start a few days of commuting between yoga in Pittsburgh and visiting my parents in the Cleveland area.  While I’m visiting with my parents, I’ll be pretty oblivious to the longer-run economic problems our country faces as well, because our family faces no such demographic challenge.  My mom is celebrating her 75th birthday on Sunday, and my dad is almost 76 and is still working full time.  They don’t yet need me or my sister to support them–in fact, I doubt they ever will need my financial support.  (They’ll always need me for technological and other miscellaneous “support.”)  And of course, I have four children, which is not just good for supporting my own old age but is also my little contribution toward the Social Security crisis.  In fact, kid #1 is already paying Social Security taxes at her Baskin-Robbins job.  (I’m pretty confident she’ll eventually have an even better, more productive job later in her life, but she already views her job as much more productive than mine.  By the way, she highly recommends the “tropical ice” flavor.)

And getting back to today’s bad news, economists are saying (on Wall Street Journal blog) that my daughter’s recently acquired Baskin-Robbins job is actually related to the spike up in the unemployment rate, as more teens and young adults are looking for summer jobs and entering the labor force.  But that doesn’t necessarily soften the bad news–because the fact that so many of these young people are suddenly desperately seeking summer work, compared with years past, could just be yet another sign of a recessionary economy and the financial straits American families currently find themselves in.