So here we are at the tail end of the disastrous Bush era - 201 days and 14 hours left at this writing - and can start doing damage assessments. Take the economy. Our currency has lost half its value, our government debt has roughly doubled, we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs and replaced them with lower-paying jobs in the service sector, our infrastructure is crumbling, and most importantly, due to a burst asset bubble created by lax regulation in the housing industry that in turn produced a credit bubble, our economy is going to either stay stagnant or contract outright. As The New York Times points out today, this state of affairs is likely to persist until the Fall of 2009. In short, we are fucked.

You'll be hearing apologies for this from conservatives with all the frequency you heard them from Soviet-era apparatchiks, of course. One virtue of being an ideologue is that you're never wrong, no matter how crushing the weight of facts that might indicate otherwise.

So, as some parts of the country are in recession and others lurch into outright depression - Michigan, Ohio and Indiana along with most of the rust belt, for example - it's time to take a sobering look at what the medium-term future may hold for the City of New York.

The Federal Reserve today confirms the economic underpinnings of a gloomy NYT/CBS poll yesterday that found high levels of economic anxiety among New Yorkers; expectations weren't high for the manufacturing sector to begin with, but they've been underperformed.

Manufacturing in the New York region shrank more than forecast in June as customers reduced orders because of the slowdown in consumer spending and business investment.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's general economic index dropped to minus 8.7 from minus 3.2 a month earlier, the bank said today. Readings less than zero signal contraction. [...]

The New York Fed began its Empire State gauge in 2001. It provides one of the month's earliest pictures of the state of manufacturing. The region's general economic index averaged 17.2 in 2007 and reached a record low of minus 22.2 in March. This month's survey was taken from June 2 through June 12.

Economists forecast the Empire State index would rise to minus 2 this month, according to the median of 51 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Tomorrow, the Fed publishes its report for national industrial production in May. On June 19, the Fed's Philadelphia branch releases its own factory data.

Now, it would be easy for City people to shrug this off as immaterial to their own immediate circumstances, since everyone knows nothing is manufactured in New York City. This assumption, however, is false: the five boroughs contain 7,000 manufacturing enterprises employing roughly 100,000 workers.

The unemployment rate jumped from 5.0% to 5.5% in just one month, the largest jump in 22 years. Did everyone suddenly get laid off? No. The problem with numbers like this is that they are incomplete.

The one factor left out of the headline is the number of people who are considered to be in the workforce -- either with a job or actively seeking a job. For the past five months, the number of people with a job has declined, but the unemployment rate barely budged because so many people gave up and weren't considered part of the workforce. Last month, about 400,000 people re-entered the workforce; combined with 49,000 lost jobs, that caused the surge.

The real problem is in the long-term numbers. Note the chart below:

This chart shows the percentage of adult Americans who have a job, from 1948 to the present. Notice that the chart generally rises when the economy expands and falls during a recession (with a slight lag). Notice also that every peak over the last 45 years is higher than the previous peak -- except one.

Are you better off than you were 8 years ago?

Unless you are CEO of Exxon/Mobil, Shell Oil or Halliburton, the answer is almost certainly a resounding "no!"

America is worse off than 8 years ago. We have the worst deficit in American history. We are experiencing inflation and stagnation. Prices are through the roof. Oil is at an all time high. Wheat is at an all time high. Don't know about you, but where I live even things like tomato sauce and cheese are sharply more expensive than I have ever seen them. In my neighborhood stores and restaurants close every day, hit by a double whammy of high real estate prices and sagging business. Hate crimes are up. Incomes are down. Job growth has been flat. Bankruptcies and defaults are becoming epidemic. Our infrastructure is failing.

America is worse off than it was 8 years ago. It is dramatically worse off.

While progressive sentiment is strong is the land (most people when asked, for example, favor single-payer universal health insurance, nowhere on the political agenda), progressive institutions are not. Our leaders are blown like dry leaves by the force of concentrated power, even if their personal convictions might lead them elsewhere.

Congress has just enacted a multi-Billion “stimulus” package to put cash into people’s hands and pump money into the economy so as to deter the looming (but technically not-here-yet) recession. The basic stories are reported in the NY Times and Washington Post . The package price is between $152- and $168 Billion; bringing to mind Everett Dirkson's remark: "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money". The package passed is better than that bargained for by President Bush and Speaker Pelosi. There are problems with the package.

It throws from the train the weakest and poorest of us: no food stamp increases and no extension for longer term unemployed. The George Bush-Nancy Pelosi vision of compassionate conservatism shuts out the poor. Money for the poor and unemployed would have been the quickest spent and produced the most economic activity for each dollar spent.

Do you have to be a Nobel-prize winning economist like Joseph Stiglitz to understand that a fast, effective way to spend our way out of the Bush-GOP-invented economic swamp is to put cash into the hands of the poor? Food stamp increases and extension of unemployment insurance benefits could be done quickly by Congress and would be spent right away by the lower-income people they’d reach.

Yet, of course, the Bush-Pelosi plan doesn’t include them. It could be a worse plan, of course but its mechanism, tax refunds, will take five months (best case) and it directs the pump-priming cash to people who might well bank it instead of spending it. Indeed two-thirds of the money in the Bush-Pelosi plan goes to higher income while only a third goes to poorer people. ( Andrew Leonard at Salon tracks the saddest-funniest food story: Republicans saving the poor from fatness by blocking boost in food stamps. Who knew?) Many, many (too many?) updates (5 sets) are at the end of the post. Also Take Action! Urge a progressive stimulus package! Link at the end. .

This has led progressives like economist-columnist Paul Krugman to pan the Bush-Pelosi deal:

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest employment figures today, and they continue to be disturbing. According to the BLS, the economy only added 92.000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate edged up from 4.5% to 4.6%. But those numbers don't tell the whole story.

Actually, the real clue comes from the job creation rate, which continues to lag behind the number needed merely to keep pace with population growth. So if not enough jobs are being created, why isn't the official unemployment rate higher? It's because fewer Americans are considered to be part of the workforce.

Specifically, 63% of Americans 16 and older are officially in the workforce. That's down from a 64.25% average during the last three years of the Clinton administration -- a figure Bush has never been able to reach. These percentages translate into just over three million Americans whom the BLS considers to be "unpersons." Add those three million unemployed Americans into the mix, and the rate jumps from 4.6% to 6.4% -- and rising.

What's worse ...