They call it a balloon because

it keeps expanding the more (hot) air you put into it. Every kid learns that you can only blow the balloon up so far before it bursts. In the U.S., the economic balloon may not have burst, but it has slipped out of our hands and is now flying around the room with the air rushing out of it.

One of the key indicators of how our economy has been doing over the past several decades has been the steady increase in worker productivity. (The amount an employee produces for every hour at work.) The nasty secret—if you can call it a secret—has been that productivity has had a phony factor known as simply requiring employees to work more hours without pay.

I'm not just talking about places like Wal-Mart who lock their employees in and make them work off the clock. Nor am I talking about employers who who hire illegals to work and then keep them off the books so that they are not counted in worker productivity. We've all been asked to produce more, both on and off the books, for minuscule wage increases and sometime no increases at all in our weekly wages or actual decreases in our wages, especially with inflation factored in.

Considering the current collapse of the economy, it is a miracle that worker productivity has increased at all, but believe it or not, it has continued to grow, as reported in today's New York Times, by 1.1 percent.