The "slump" didn't move from Wall Street to Main Street. And, even if it did, it didn't happen just recently.

Over the last ten years, and most rapidly in the last seven, jobs have been moving in a steady stream out of the United States. Wages have been stagnated.

It's just reality - so many Americans have lost jobs more than once in the last few years only to find the replacement jobs paid less money.

We - ordinary Americans - have been explaining that the loss of factories, family farms, small box retail stores and homegrown companies have been causing us distress for several years.

We haven't been able to afford goods and groceries for several years. Inflation of these items has been steady in the last two or three years.

Visa, MasterCard and Discover gave us a few extra years before we had to really face the facts. Thanks to plastic, we - ordinary Americans - all started charging our groceries on our credit cards. We really had not other choice. We all bought laundry soap, milk and pinto beans by borrowing money from Visa or MC. Then, Visa or MC raises our interest rates, or stops raising our credit limits.

All the while, the cost of milk and gasoline steadily rises, without reprieve.

"This is what's at the core of the middle-class squeeze," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

"The idea that you can understand the kind of budget constraints that middle-class families face by looking at overall inflation is wrong. You have to look at the core items a middle-class family buys."

The emergency finally hits us in 2007 when we - ordinary Americans - can no longer afford milk and gasoline while also paying for our mortgages.

So some of us - ordinary hardworking Americans - begin to default on our mortgages. For many of us, these mortgages were borrowed against our family farms that our ancestors homesteaded. For others, the mortgages are the result of refinancing that we acquired against the homes we'd lived in for decades - just because we needed money for milk and gasoline, or to pay the Visa bill we ran up by buying milk or gasoline.

We - ordinary Americans - are left with few choices. We'd been scrimping, saving and stressing over our family budgets for five to ten years. Now, we begin to lose our homes, our farms and our automobiles - in addition to the jobs and incomes that we have already lost.

So, when many of us have our homes and farms foreclosed, it begins to finally harm Wall Street. The investors who have profited so largely in the last few years (while we struggled) finally feel a little bit of distress.

There's still plenty of investors and Wall Street companies that continue to profit from the distress and inflation that we have endured.

Take ExxonMobil for instance, the provider of the most gasoline. Every year in the last five years, Exxon has experienced not only the highest profits that it had every experienced in its corporate history - but Exxon has actually experienced the greatest profits that any corporation in the history of the earth has ever experienced. All this profit on the backs of us - ordinary Americans. As we find it hard to afford that gallon of gasoline.

My problem with the headline - Slump Moves from Wall Street to Main Street - is that it implies or suggests that the slump is just now moving into the heartland. See, the slump has kept us from sleeping at night, in the heartland, for many years. Perhaps that article shows its own bias when it says this:

To be sure, there are many places where talk of recession still seems as out of place as a diner trying to score a table at a trendy Los Angeles restaurant without reservations on a Saturday night. First-class cabins of airplanes are jammed. So are spas, cigar bars and children’s clothing boutiques selling upscale dresses.

To be sure - what we need is media that lives and breathes what ordinary Americans live and breathe.

The price for dairy products has risen 15 percent since 2006; fruits and vegetables are up 10 percent. Even routine cereals and bakery products are up 8 percent. I live in America's heartland, where the economy is supposed to be less volatile or more sane. Even here, my neighbors are paying close to $4 for a gallon of milk and nearly $3.40 for one gallon of gasoline. The deeply rooted set of problems in the system has caused health-care costs to rise faster than those of most goods, costing that middle-income family $204 more compared with 2006.

Poor and middle-income people are suffering the worst from inflation, middle- to upper-middle-income families are bearing the brunt of the softer real estate market, and the affluent are doing just fine although some of them may be slightly pinched by lowered stock prices on some of their more volatile investments.

The rise in the basic cost of living means that inflation disproportionately affects those with modest incomes.

But none of this is new at all. We have been struggling for years.

The only thing that is new is that our struggles are now affecting a small segment of investors on Wall Street.