watch it: the 11/21/09 weekly address from President Barack Obama

Eleven percent unemployment is NOT recovering. We're in this recession until unemployment gets back down to 5 percent or so...

We’re emerging from the Great Recession? Who knew? Hoorah!

And posterity is just around the corner...or something like that.

I'd like to think we're emerging from the Great Recession but I know too many people who are either unemployed or underemployed to be all that optimistic.

Seems to me that there's going to be a lot of bad isms floating around this holiday season and the worst of these is Panglossism...

Ok, it's easy to play the populist, "Oh no, unemployment is still high, the recession isn't over!" rabble-rouser card, but the fact is that unemployment is a lagging economic indicator. It has been in every recession, and so it is in this one. The good news is that means people don't start losing their jobs until a bit after the recession is already underway. The bad news is that means those jobs don't start coming back until a bit after the recession is already over. But the point is, the unemployment rate is not the sole indicator of the economy. We've been experiencing positive growth, there are, indeed, lots of good signs. For real! And I say this as someone who is actually out of work. It'd be easy for me to yell and scream about how the recession isn't over until I personally have a job, but that's silly.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking out NPR's Planet Money. They run a blog here and from their you can subscribe to their podcast as well. I've been listening to the podcast for the past year, and it's really helped me understand more about the economy, and what the hell has been going on. They're smart, informative, AND entertaining. And it's NPR, so they're good about being impartial, they've said it's really bad when it was really bad, and they've pointed out good things when there has been good to point out. And looking at things recently, I am optimistic that we are heading out of the recession (or that we might even already be out of it!), and that the jobs will start coming back soon enough.

Well I'm certainly not going to believe it coming from a politician. I don't think most of them know the first thing about economics (not that I'm an expert myself).