The recession has undoubtedly been tough on the oldest of the older crowd, and rumor has it that blatant age discrimination is the reason.

For example, see TLNT's What Discrimination Looks Like in 2011: It's Older and Unemployed, and the recent story in which Home Depot fired an 80-year-old supervisor in New York because she purchased 24 cents' worth of screws so that she could get cash back and avoid paying an ATM fee.* (Hat tip to Workplace Diva for the Home Depot story.)

But, as Henry Fonda's character said in Twelve Angry Men, "It's always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth. I don't really know what the truth is."

Here are a few reasons why I question whether age discrimination explains the difficulties that the oldest workers are having: