Have you ever wondered just what happens to all those people we keep reading about in the news, and in the government’s seriously flawed demography, who have just dropped out of sight in this depression? Yes… depression.

I’ve had it with the cutesy defining of a recession that in no way ended in 2009, as the politicians and their pet economic idiot savants claim. “Why, Skip” you say, “we had two quarters of positive growth in 2009?. Okay, and if you believe that math, I have some shares in Solyndra for sale for you, cheap.

Ask just about anyone in the great San Joaquin and Central Valleys here in California, agricultural regions that could have fed the world with their bounty, if the recession has ever ended. Ask them if they see anything on the horizon except more crippling regulation, taxation or punitive regulatory dictat from both the Federal Government and that runaway bunch of Marxist radicals infesting Sacramento.

There are pockets of chronic unemployment in some of those communities as high as 30% or 40%, with an average of a whopping 25%. A figure I found difficult to swallow until I heard them re-stated by some people in the valleys and by one of the few conservative lawmakers in California, Devin Nunes. I wish he was my representative. This guy is the real deal.

Parisian Rag-Pickers, by Raffaelli.