It's a Depression.

We're in a depression and our fearless leaders are behaving precisely how they behaved last time:  focusing on cementing their political control over institutions and industries while society rots beneath them.  As Rahm Emmanuel, the current Capo de Tutti of Chicago famously said:  "never let a crisis go to waste".  Our leaders are fiddling to increase their power and status while the nation burns.

Mort Zuckerman isn't afraid to start using the "D" word:

If you went out this morning and saw hundreds of people lining up at soup kitchens, you'd think you were in a time machine, transported back to the Great Depression of the '30s, or the victim of a hallucination incubated by powerful images of those times. In fact, it is the absence of such images that is the illusion. We believe we live in more normal times—and we do not. Millions of people today are experiencing exactly the same struggle as the millions did in the Great Depression. They can't find work. They depend on government and philanthropy. They live on hope denied.

The big difference: Today millions are assisted by checks from Social Security and by food stamps. Food-stamp enrollment has been rising at the rate of 400,000 per month. More than 47 million Americans now depend on that program, an almost incredible record, for it is 15 percent of the population compared with the 7.9 percent who received food stamps from 1970 to 2000. Meanwhile, nearly 11 million Americans are now collecting federal disability checks from Social Security, and half have signed on since President Obama came to office. In 1992, there was one person on disability for every 35 workers. Today it is one for every 16. Such an increase simply cannot have been caused by direct disability experienced during employment. This is in effect another unemployment program, one without end. Many of the people on disability would normally be considered unemployed.

The reality is, we are experiencing a modern-day Depression.It is harder to find work than it has been in any previous economic recovery period. Typically, it takes 25 months to close the employment gap from the employment peak near the start of a downturn. But this time around, five years after employment peaked in January 2008, non-farm employment is still roughly 4 million below where it started. Never before has the job level not been at a record high during the fourth year into a business cycle 

In fact, 4.5 million fewer Americans are working today than when the recession started, and fewer are working today than in the year 2000, despite the fact that our population has grown by 31 million and our labor force by 11.4 million. Though the White House forecast four years ago that, with its stimulus policies, the jobless rate would be down to 5.2 percent by now, the real unemployment rate is 14.4 percent.

Of course if your goal is to build the perfect 'progressive' state then radically increasing normal people's dependence upon it is a core goal.  With the ongoing depression and the advent of the "Affordable" Care Act more than half of the population will either be employed by or dependent upon some form of government dole.  The Progs who rule us believe (rightly) that once the majority of electors are dependent upon the state for their daily bread, the party of the state will have effective permanent power.  "Can't make ends meet kiddo?  Well here's a (job, dole, handout, program) to help you out.  Just remember at election time who gave that to you, ok?"

Maximum dependence has always been the real object of Progressivism.  Why else would they pursue policies that inevitably drive up the cost of housing, food, energy and education?  The other 'social' values are just window dressing for their will to power.  Don't believe me?  Ask the inmates of Guantanamo.  Or a family of drone victims (well you can't ask them because they;re dead).  Or Chicago. Or our comprehensively looted children.

It's all so progressive.