The economy shed 80,000 jobs in March, the third consecutive month of rising unemployment, presenting a stark sign that the country may already be in a recession.

Sharp downturns in the manufacturing and construction sectors led the decline, the biggest in five years. The Labor Department also said employers cut far more jobs in January and February than originally estimated.

Question: Is it possible to be having "a pretty good economic run" while food stamp recipients are rising to their highest levels in four decades?

Answer: Depends on who you're talking about.

Back in mid-December, just 3 1/2 months ago, President Bush delivered another one of his absurd speeches about the U.S. economy. He told us that "we've had a pretty good economic run" and that "the underpinning [of the economy] is good."

On March 31, 2008, we read this:

Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.

What is going on here? Is Bush lying about the economy, too? Or could it be that he simply does not know that all is not well for those Americans in our working middle-class? Or something else altogether?

Unemployment soared in March rising from 4.8% up to 5.1% bringing the unemployment rate to its highest levels since 2005. Payrolls shrank by 80,000 as the recession continues to deepen. This was the third consecutive month of job losses. Economists were expecting job losses of 76,000.

Wall Street doesn't care about you.

It's too busy fighting for its life. Big Wall Street firms have taken the U.S. economy to the threshold of the abyss, a cataclysmic vortex of wealth destruction not seen since the Great Depression.

We're about to watch the Fed sink its claws into Wall Street, forever changing the game, says Brian Hicks.

We're also watching as the Bush Administration introduces the Wall Street "overhaul," the broadest plan of financial oversight since the Great Depression, which could change the way the government regulates thousands of businesses.

Not to worry, though. It's unlikely we'll see it in action any time soon. Former housing bull and "at or near bottom" pontificator Hank Paulson assures us that the changes are intended for longer-term problems, than serve as a quick fix.

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track," up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, had been "timid and unenthusiastic" in his proposals for dealing with the current economic downturn. She also said that Senator John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, would simply continue what she called the failed economic policies of President Bush.

Much of the administration's faulty economic policy may be traced to its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter because it has been larger, costlier, and more diverting. I use the word diverting deliberately to emphasize that the government's military adventures in southwest Asia have served to draw the public's attention away from economic measures that otherwise would have attracted more notice and hence more resistance.

One reason war is always associated with especially rapid growth of the government's size, scope, and power is that it focuses people's attention on what is seen as the most pressing item on the agenda, so they simply don't notice what the government is doing in other regards. Another reason is that during wartime many people increase their broad support for the government, and hence they are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing to do with the war.

If our president is correct, his $168 billion economic stimulus package will turn our slowing economy around.

But I don't believe it.

You can give away as much free money as you want, but people are still going to struggle paying for gas and electricity, lose their homes and lose their jobs because let's face it - the U.S. is falling behind in the world.

Instead of giving us a small amount of money, the government needs to create jobs. The cash incentive is just a short-term solution. A little $600 check in our hands isn't going to create a sonic boom of spending.

So how do you do it? It won't happen overnight, of course, but we should start looking at what other countries are doing, and maybe we could learn a few things.

One of the planks that economic Pollyannas have been resting their bullish outlooks on is the fact that the U.S. unemployment rate is not far off the lows seen since the economy rebounded from the 2001 recession.

Unfortunately, the optimists seem to be relying on a statistical mirage. That shouldn't surprise readers of this blog. As many Americans have come to realize, the data our government produces often doesn't jibe with the reality they know.

In "The Underemployment Rate Is Rising," CNNMoney.com's Chris Isidore explores this issue in greater detail.

Don't be fooled by the relatively low 4.8% unemployment rate. Other measures, such as the number of people only working part-time, are a sign of recession.

Billionaire financier George Soros made headlines again this week with his warning that the global "super boom" that drove the world economy since the Second World War is over. In a documentary that aired on the BBC, Soros asserted that the current malaise in the U.S. financial markets signals the end of the age of leverage, easy money, and rapid growth. The new danger, he worried, would be that growing protectionism would send the global economy into a recession, "or worse."

Oddly, he went on to say to the makers of the aptly named documentary Super Rich: the Greed Game that the benefits of the super boom weren't evenly distributed; in reality, relatively few people like himself benefited from the boom of the past 60 years. The implication: average folks have been fighting over table scraps for decades. Hardly makes one nostalgic for the good old super boom days.

Soros is right about one thing: the next global economy is going to be very different than the last one.

Consider this: 700,000 people around the world log onto the Internet for the first time every day. At that rate, by 2011­ - "a mere thousand days away" - the number of Internet users will exceed 3.5 billion. At that point, more inhabitants of the planet will be online than off.

More significantly, those three billion people approximate the world's entire labor force. That means for the first time in history, all the world's workers will be connected in a single, seamless economic system - "a system, remember, that encourages each of us to buy from, sell to, and trade with each other directly, unimpeded by middlemen, brokers, or even governments. After that "jump point," the global economy will be bigger, flatter, more diverse, and more competitive than ever.