Don't let anyone tell you the economy is improving

This is the big lie circulating these days, mainly, I suppose, because the media have tired of reporting on the Great Recession. Not that they did a particularly good job of it....

There may be signs of hope... sprigs of green pushing out of the late winter snows... stock prices have rebounded... the big banks have paid off most of the TARP money... GM reported its first annual profit since 2004 (there were quarterly profits in 2010 and 2007)....

But however healthy things seem at the top of the economy (thanks all too often to the massive and timely infusions of taxpayer money), for the rest of us, those deemed small enough to fail, things don't seem to be getting better at all.

I had a client declare bankruptcy recently. If I did bankruptcy work, that might be a good thing for me... but I don't. What that client owes me won't drive me into bankruptcy by itself... but I am teetering on the brink, too.

Somebody asked me recently whether my business is trending up or down. "I think it's more a swirling motion," I responded. The February rent is not yet paid. March starts next week.

And, while I hope my own situation will improve soon, for the economy as a whole, it seems likely to get worse before it gets better: Governments at all levels are broke. Yet, in many states, such as Illinois, there is no incentive to stand up to the public employee unions that have such a large say in who attains elective office. So taxes must go up instead. (Tea Party pipe dreams notwithstanding, even a stiff dose of fiscal courage would probably include some sort of tax increases at almost all levels anyway. The shame of it is that there is no 'rightsizing' -- a hated private sector euphemism for layoffs -- likely in the public sector. Thus, however much taxes go up, we're really only postponing a day of reckoning.)

Although Illinois may have found one silver lining in all this: We had Democratic members of the Wisconsin State Senate hiding out in Rockford and Harvard and even Chicago, trying to prevent a vote on measures proposed by Wisconsin's Republican Governor, Scott Walker, that would require public sector employees to contribute more to their own health care and pension costs, limit their right to strike, limit their union's rights to bargain to wages only and not working conditions, and limit the extent of raises that may be granted. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators fleeing Indianapolis (where a right to work vote was set for the Indiana legislature) took refuge in places like downstate Champaign.

Finally a growth industry in Illinois! Playing host to legislators shirking their duties in other states. As long as they don't thereafter shirk their bills here....