As economic malaise sweeps the nation and McDonald's transforms into an aspirational dining experience, it's becoming ever more clear that eating, in America, ain't what it used to be.

Good news from the world of Economia! Well, not "good," exactly. Bad. Bad news. The glorious economic recovery seems to be in danger of stalling, what with the sluggish growth rate, persistent unemployment, and general malaise among the non-investing class.

The greatest benefit of the assassination of the world's most wanted terrorist: "a short-term psychological boost to financial markets." I mean, killing this dude is no "April non-farms payroll data," but we'll take what we can get.

Think you're middle class? Bullshit! Idiots! Nobody in the entire world knows what class they're in, these days. Rich Americans don't think they're rich until they're septa-millionaires. And foreigners are just as bad; a new study of 1,100 Argentinians found that "everyone thought they were basically middle class."

Despite having cornered the market on cheap crap, Wal-Mart just isn't as popular as it used to be. Not to worry. Wal-Mart knows exactly what you animals want: deadly weapons.

Hans-Peter Feldmann (pictured, at right) won the $100,000 "Hugo Boss Prize" last year, for being a good artist. Looks like you miscalculated, Hugo: Hans-Peter is totally sticking all of your money to a wall.

The whole nation of America was founded on the premise of being "one big happy family," with equality for all—women and minorities now included by law! Sadly, economists tell us that income inequality may be eroding the trust between the rich and the poor members of the American "family." What's the reason for the treason, distrustful poors?

Americans are—we are sorry to say—whiny, dissatisfied, lazy stereotypes of themselves, always looking for a "handout" rather than a "hand up."

Teetering teenage titty tableau titillator American Apparel has been wrestling this week with the question of how to get millions of dollars to keep itself alive while still being run by Dov Charney, a crazy person. They've done it! How? They found the minute handful of people in North America who A) have millions of dollars to invest, and B) do not think Dov Charney is a crazy person. What are the chances?

The state of New Jersey instituted a "millionaire's tax" (those making over $500K had their state tax rate raised to 9% from about 6.5%) in 2004, because its multimillionaire governor at the time was a socialist who hates success. Now, a new study has documented the devastating effect that this penurious and unfair tax scheme had on the state, as all the millionaires packed up and fled for friendlier locales:

In 2009, the American Mall was dying. In 2010, the American Mall was still dying. In 2011: Hey, how'd you like to buy an American Mall?

Fashion pimp of trendy hose American Apparel is in mortal financial peril at the moment; it needs an infusion of cash to stave off a possible bankruptcy. Investors have the cash, and the interest in the brand; what they don't have, in all likelihood, is an interest in handing a huge pile of cash over to the sole control of Dov Charney, who—despite his unshakeable confidence in himself—is the one who got the company in this situation in the first place.

One portion of the devastating documentary about the global financial collapse, Inside Job (which won an Oscar, so you have to see it), dealt with academic economists—specifically, the ways that they became financially tied to banks and other players in finance, and how that may have compromised the entire practice of economics. It even showed the heads of the economic departments at Harvard (pictured) and Columbia blithely asserting that there was no need to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in academic papers. It was sickening.

The American empire took another small step towards its inevitable fall this morning as the S&P cut its outlook on the nation's credit rating to "negative." The chance that our national credit rating will be downgraded from its current AAA rating some time in the next two years is now "at least one-in-three."

Groupon clone LivingSocial just raised a terrifying $400 million in a funding round, half of which will go to the investors smart enough to get in early on this total knockoff coupon site. This comes just months after Groupon raised, like, a billion dollars in their own funding round. Is this even remotely sustainable?

Sarah Lawrence is America's most expensive college. It'll cost you a cool $59,000 to send your whelp there to sit shoeless on a grass lawn, becoming a lesbian. Why so pricey? The school's president has all sorts of dubious explanations.

NPR—and the entire public broadcasting apparatus in general—has had a bad year. The botched Juan Williams firing, followed by the botched fallout from the Juan Williams firing, followed by the dumb James O'Keefe prank pseudocontroversy, followed by the resignation of NPR's CEO, mixed with constant calls from Republicans to defund NPR, which even convinced some pinko liberals that NPR should just get off the government payroll once and for all.

Hey, underemployed recent college graduates struggling in the worst job market in a generation: do you have a trillion dollars? I really hope you have a trillion dollars. Because you owe a trillion dollars, in student loans.

The ongoing Great American Economic Recovery is... well, let's say it's a "mixed bag," to keep everyone's spirits up. On the downside, prices are rising faster than wages, meaning that your meager stores of money are becoming more worthless by the day. And the cost of driving is rising rapidly, taking a bite out of your paltry paycheck before you even get to work.

Vice Media, the parent company of Vice magazine, VBS.tv, and other editorial ventures whose quality content is still tinged by a permanent veil of—well, you know what we mean—is now insanely rich. Are you surprised?