Recession Makes Americans Kill Pets, Quit Having Kids

Not that you'd notice from the 40 million unemployed "workers" in this country, or the way all the houses in your neighborhood are being abandoned by night, or the miles of empty strip malls on the edge of every doomed American town, but experts in New York and Washington (the only two thriving cities in America, hah!) now say we may be "returning" to the Great Recession because the "recovery" has stalled. Oh noes. We have another theory that's not very controversial, when you consider the almost daily "downgrades" of previously reported economic figures from the past several quarters: We never gotoutof recession, and we never will. Also, record numbers of cute puppies are being euthanized at American animal shelters!

As more people lose their jobs and homes, pets are being abandoned in record numbers, leaving local shelters overflowing with animals as adoption lags.

That's the cheery opening to another grim "families are taking their beloved pets to be executed" story, this from the once-wealthy resort town of Palm Springs, California. What next, droppingbabiesoff to be "put to sleep" because mommy doesn't have a job and daddy hasn't been heard from for a long, long time?

Almost! In the meantime, Americans have simply stopped having babies. While idiot white trash like Bristol Palin may continue to poop out unwanted children, most poor Americans (and by that we mean, "most Americans") have figured out that Jeebus turned off the Penney's card and Paychex Advance storefronts are less welcoming when you have no paychex. The U.S. birthrate has suddenly and violently collapsed:  

The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century.

Births fell 2.7% last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

Granted, at least some Americans are still managing to find each others' diseased genitalia under those flaps of fat and get busy makin' babies, because the 2009 U.S. birthrate was 13.5 per 1,000 people. But that's down from 14.3 in 2007, before the economic collapse became inescapable.(European countries such as France and Germany and the UK are seeing birth rate increases .)

Along with the 14% of mortgage holders currently in default or foreclosure and the latest collapse of both new and existing home sales and the continued decline in consumer spending and the total crackdown on any kind of small-business or consumer credit, you may be forgiven for completely forgetting about the Robust Recovery that our nation supposedly enjoyed earlier this year.