What if I gave a recession, but everyone was already there?

As I recall, Hillary was the first during Saturday's debates to bring up the dreaded R-word, recession. There is ever-growing talk about that possibility, what with the mortgage crisis possibly leading to a decrease in consumer spending. What is a recession? It's defined as a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters.

What's interesting about that definition is that we often don't know if we're in a recession until after it's over and the economists have managed to nail down the precise GDP number. In fact, you can easily find discussions in 2007 as to whether we had a recession in 2001-02! That's right, five or six years after the fact, economists can still debate the existence of a recession.

What is of greater interest to me at the moment, however, is the thought that we may already be in a recession, at least those of us not in the high-earning categories. I don't know how one would extract the data, but growing income inequality, coupled with higher costs (some of which are not counted in income statistics due to their volatility, you know, little things like food and energy) that tend to hit harder on those who already have less, make me think that GDP of the bottom 85-90% of the country may be in sharp decline.

We know that many of the consumer purchases of the last several years have been funded by debt, mainly the extraction of spurious home equity. We know that the savings rate of Americans is now negative. So why is it impossible that, for a great segment of our population, recession is already here? Which might explain why consumer confidence continues to be low, despite the head-scratching of the "experts."