My 84 year old father is a child of the Depression. He is old enough to remember how bad things were at that time. My father has lived a long time, seen a lot of things and still remembers them. I preface my observations with those factoids for a reason. My father says the current US economic and employment situation is the worst he can remember. The WORST.
If a 20,30, or 40-something says the same thing, I would take it with a large grain of salt. When an 84 year old says the same, I stand up and take notice.
Interesting; I've had a bit of an intuitive feel that this was the case. In some sense it's good to see that my gut was right... though I could handle being wrong in this instance.
When I was looking for a job a little over a year ago, things were so bad that I thought it was 'nice'/good when I got a hand-signed rejection letter, instead of just a "you are no longer under consideration" e-mail.
This time around it seems as though there's no rejection e-mail either, just a sort of silently dropping you from the lists.
The irksome thing is that I don't believe we've seen the worst of it; the way things are going we will be embroiled in a war shortly, or forever enslaved, due to "our" uncontrolled debt. (It's reaching the point the interest alone will be unpayable by the government, at that point all bets are off.)