I'm not sure what you mean by my "personal experience" as it relates to the national economy. I was giving you my "personal standpoint" on the issue, which in no way should be wholly derived from my personal experience, but more by my personal knowledge on subject matter. Naturally, I work in the airline industry, otherwise I wouldn't be on this message board, and I've worked in various finance roles for about 5 years. Again, wholly irrelevant to the issue, but you oddly seem to place some sort of weight on the matter.The fact that you so deftly sidestepped my comment on personal experience is not lost on me. I give credit to Jet Tech and Ramblingray for revealing their personal standpoint even if they aren't popular. I also give them credit for not stooping to lobbing rotten tomatos at me. Although I don't agree with everything they say, at least they are relating it to personal experience. I have 19 years' experience in this industry in Flight Operations, Maintenance Operations and Ground Operations. Since your personal standpoint is so glaringly omitted, I won't belabor the point ad nauseum.
I take it that you'd rather base your view of the economy in terms of anecdotes that support your doom and gloom world-view rather than hard statistics. I just wanted to possibly give you some reality based information that might ease your mind as far as the economy as a whole is concerned. If you choose to ignore the breadth of information out there that critically and objectively analyzes the health of the economy as a whole, then you will be selling yourself short when it comes to any discussion on the matter.