When I look out my living room window over to the Marathon gas station on North Dixie Freeway, my eyes become glued to the gas prices, which for the past week have been stuck at $3.999 a gallon for regular unleaded. I cannot understand why they even bother with that third digit. Just get to four bucks. God knows it is not going to stop there, anyway. I feel sorry for all the hard-working middle class families in our community that bought those huge sport utility vehicles that now cost anywhere from $70 to $100 to gas up. I have a little car. Well, sort of. It's a gas hog. I wish I could gas up with regular unleaded but my Audi TT convertible takes the 93 or super-unleaded gas to satisfy the turbo that sucks it up. A full tank runs me $50. When I bought the sports car four years ago, a fill-up was $30. The monthly payments, of course, haven't decreased, though they are thankfully coming to an end. All of this begs the question and the dirty "R" word nobody wants to utter: Are we in a recession? I'll answer this question with another question: How can we not be? The job market is tough. The housing market is nearly non-existent and consumer confidence is down. People aren't spending, but they aren't saving either. And that's putting added pressure on banking and the stock market. Oil prices have been on a steady increase, even as demand has leveled off. Here are some interesting facets to support identifying our national economy as being in a recession. * U.S. home prices dropped by the sharpest rate in two decades in the first quarter of this year, according to a leading index Tuesday, re-emphasizing that the national housing slump is far from over. The national home price index dropped 14.1 percent compared to the first quarter of last year, according to Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller. The index, which covers all nine U.S, Census Divisions, said this was the biggest drop since its inception in 1988. * Ford Motor Co. is planning to lay off as much as 12 percent of its workforce -- or more than 2,000 jobs -- to deal with hemorrhaging sales and high gas prices, The Detroit Free-Press reported Wednesday. Ford had announced publicly last week that it planned to cut production and did not expect to return to profitability in 2009. * Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in 16 years with Americans weary about holding onto their jobs and pessimistic about the economy turning around anytime soon, according to the New York-based Conference Board. The Conference Board reported Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index dropped to 57.2 -- the lowest level since October 1992. By comparison, April's figure was 62.8, with this month's figure and April's being the continuation of five straight months of decline. Hopefully, the marketplace will right itself with as little government interference as possible. After all, these things are cyclical and we're certainly a long way off from using the dreaded "D" word: Depression.