I bumped into an acquaintance yesterday, the woman who painted a portrait of our dog, which hangs on a wall in our fireplace room. She's a very talented artist, capable of everything from postcards to murals, depicting mostly pets, but also athletes and golf course scenery, that sort of thing. Just last year she was selling her pieces out of a gallery in posh Scottsdale. Of course, her husband was a very successful finance guy, so it was easy for her to take the time to hone her craft. She has a natural touch with a paintbrush, but still, it's hard to get really good at anything while working full-time to feed your belly. Trust me, I know.

Yesterday, though, she had to tell me that things haven't gone so well lately. She didn't offer up too many details, and I certainly didn't pry, so all I can tell you is that they "lost everything," in her words. Such is the world of investment these days. The Clinton boom years led everyone to believe that our money was safe in the stock market. And Bush, despite the fact that he knew better, gutlessly told them the same thing. So the painter and her husband had to sell their beautiful mansion on the hill, in which they had lived for years, and move into a lesser uptown home, one with a nice garden. "If I can't have money," she said, "I can at least enjoy nature."

Again, I haven't the faintest idea what went wrong there, but it's a pretty clear example that the economy is not turning around, not for anybody. We're still not quite at the point where folks are selling apples on the streets, but with as much competition as they would get from the panhandlers that already abound, it's doubtful we'd even notice. I see the Dow has been hovering around 9000 points lately, but that's all paper and no coin. As business columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, the run that got us up this high was based on the assumptions of investors that, if they didn't get the stuff cheap, they wouldn't be getting it at all. It's called a bubble.

Yet the price-earnings ratio of most stocks remains at 30 or 40 to 1. The stock you're paying for isn't really worth anything, and isn't going to be for a long time. Account for brokerage fees and inflation, and you're probably losing money in the long term. And that's before the bubble bursts. I'm no economist - but the artist's husband was a successful one, and he couldn't get out of the way of the steamroller. He's not alone. Quite a few people I've talked to, people who have the kind of money most of us wish we had, can't seem to say anything good about the economy. Their responses are weary. They want to believe it will come around, the way astronomers know a comet will come around, if only because they've seen it before. But their businesses are losing money. Their portfolios are in disarray.

And that's just the plight of the wealthy. Poor people aren't complaining about the economy, because they don't know porterhouse from prime rib. To the masses, it's all hamburger. Those who make so little money as to have to receive assistance from the government, just to feed their kids, don't know or care when the top tiers of the cake - the cake they can't have - start to sway. They have bigger concerns sitting across from them at the dinner table every night.

Then you have the dwindling middle class. Our dilemmas lie in the median range of the atmosphere. If you want to live in a nice house in a decent neighborhood, you need a good job. If you want a good job, you more than likely have to commute. If you have to commute, you need a reliable car. If you want a reliable car, you have to take out a loan. But that's okay, because you have a good job. Somewhere, stacked into that equation, lurks the fact that jobs are disappearing still.

For some, losing employment means very little. Take a few weeks off; go find some more work. Many of today's lost jobs, however, aren't coming back, either due to mechanization or offshore outsourcing. Suppose you're an accountant (there are too many of you anyway). How are you supposed to compete with accounting firms in India, where the wages are cheap because nobody eats anything over there? If you're a computer programmer, your job is doable in many other countries, most of which don't have union or health care issues. Imagine you're in manufacturing; good, honest, blue-collar work, not the stuff of which Rockefellers are made, but it's a living. Somewhere in China, there's a political prisoner just dying to get your job.

Or worse, a robot gets your job. Employers love robots. You don't have to give a robot a break for lunch or a smoke, you don't have to insure a robot or pay it overtime, and you don't have OSHA sniffing around to make sure your robots are in a safe working environment. But robots also don't cash paychecks (minus taxes), and they don't spend money at the grocery store, and they don't pump gas into their cars. All they do is mindlessly crank out the work that you used to do, and do with pride. And they steal your livelihood; that's all they'll ever do...

Unless you count the ones back in Washington, D.C., the ones that make laws. And the ones that create public policy in between limousine rides. And the ones who get paid to represent the people, and then get paid more by the special interests and corporations who don't care one bit about the people. And the one whose cowboy boots are currently scuffing up the White House floor as he waltzes away the rest of his term.