Of COURSE not! We’re LIVING -RECESSION... still.
If I could take my family to Hawaii each Christmas, spending MILLIONS of OTHER PEOPLE’S money to do so, I’d be thinking things were swell too!
What recovery? This is not merely a recession, that ship sailed a long tome ago. This is a full-blown DEPRESSION, comparable to the period of 1938 to the outbreak of WW II.
Look at the collapsing employment numbers, and the number of otherwise able-bodied potential employees NOT working, or working at less than subsistence level, but on the dole of some kind (food stamps, Section Eight housing, “Earned Income Credit”, and Medicaid). Sure, there is some phony “unemployment rate” of “only 7%” (which is historically bad in ANY era), but the real rate is double that or more, and with the advent of the monstrosity known as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010”, the situation is only gelled and solidified into a “new normal”. Making it difficult or impossible to expand the business structure, by a combination of fines, limits to “acceptable” benefits, and mandates, the decision to halt any plans for expansion and growth, or to even close doors altogether, become the only fiscally sound responses to this “new normal”. And compounds the problem even more.
Add to this a completely unfounded demand for raising the minimum wages, and it is GUARANTEED that the wave of unemployment that has been fueled by the stagnant economy shall become a tsunami, reducing the territory once known at “the United States of America” into one of the more destitute dystopias, devastated by despotism.
You need a harbinger of this change? Just look to California, where the one-party rule has paralyzed and stripped away every advantage that California, once the most favored of localities, had enjoyed during the only very recent prosperity that buoyed the whole world for decades after the end of WW II.