"When do you think the economy is really going to recover?" The question that one of the local weekend news anchors in Dallas-Fort Worth had asked me was simple. But I couldn't answer the question, because the answer is actually in his hands.

Instead I asked whether he, like millions of Americans, had locked up his discretionary spending when the world's financial meltdown became impossible to ignore last September. He had, he conceded. And when I asked how his colleagues saw this economic downturn, each from his or her own personal perspective, he agreed that it appeared that they had also pulled back on their personal spending.

"So," I summed up, "you don't believe the happy economic stories you're reporting either."

Thrice Burned This past February I reported in a BusinessWeek column that the biggest threat to the recovery of our economy was going to be the baby boomers' severely reduced spending habits. The boomers obviously had slashed their spending to the bone in response to the past few years' repeated disasters on [and by] Wall Street. Even now, though some stabilization is in sight [and I suspect that retail is slowing improving], hard data from the real world suggests that our consumer economy might be months from bottoming out.

Demand for high-ticket consumer services, hard goods, and imports are still all but moribund. Recently American Airlines (AMR) and Delta (DAL) both confirmed they will cut their capacity still further, while Southwest (LUV) reported that its flight bookings for June were even lower than May's. U.S. Airways claims that its revenue streams today are lower than in the period after 9/11. And British Airways (BAY.L) has asked 40,000 employees to work for one month without pay in order to lighten its financial statements' red ink.

Add to the mix the fact that U.S. rail loadings for both April and May were down nearly 25%, 16,000 more trucking jobs went away in April, and container dockings at Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles have been down over 20%. All this seems to suggest that things are not quite as hopeful as they're being characterized. At best, the promise of pent-up retail demand improving in the near term -- which is what it will take for long-term economic growth to start up again -- is no easier to see.

Instead of asking any economist where the economy is going, it might be wiser to ask the 16,000 newly unemployed truck drivers.

That Payroll Problem What may be the most insidious part of this current downturn is that many organizations are not just downsizing their workforces, they're cutting wages for those individuals lucky enough to be kept on. Many such firms were purchased in leveraged buyouts over the past decade, and they owe so much that they can't both service their loans and keep paying the same wages. Therefore, the current unemployment figures don't tell the entire story on where Americans really stand today financially.