also with me is alice stewark. also, perry bacon jr., msnbc political contributor and author at thegrio.com. and kelly haul-tom kins. thank you for being here. >> daniel, your article, and the book has nerdland in a tizzy. we're trying to decide if this is the best news we can imagine, that, in fact, we have really just sort of given into a rhetoric of decline, but we're not in decline, or whether or not when you say we're doing better, you really mean corporations, you don't mean we are doing better. >> i'm just saying after that, your introduction, i'm attempted to just call it a day. all these sources of decline, obama is a ists according to the right. and the reality, our economy, on the aggregate, has come back. larger than before the recession. we have took this immense fall. none of us had ever seen anything like this. >> so you are not arguing that we did not dip into a really massive recession? >> we had the worst -- >> one longer and harder than anybody alive. >> 2009 was a 1933 moment. and in 1933, every