"It's a recession when someone you know loses their job. It's a depression when you lose your job."

True, U-6 and beyond unemployment, underemployment and just plain given up searching is so high (22% according to http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...) that we're seeing something akin to Great Depression levels. It's just that we're wealthier, have much greater safety nets (as I recall 40 million are on Food Stamps), we're more flexible, etc.

For that matter, our government is a lot better than in the Great Depression (Hoover/FDR), e.g. we aren't doing stark raving mad things like driving up food prices by destroying food and preventing planting when 1/4 of the nation is malnourished....