But now you are out of work, at least for a time. You probably don't fall into abject poverty, but times are hard and money is tight, and what do you do? You get scared. The 'what if's' sets in. Maybe you find another a job in a few months, or maybe in a couple years. In the meantime, you've lost ground financially. The job you found doesn't pay as well as the one at the mill, the retirement savings and the dream of the camper permanently parked in a campground/mobile home park in Florida where you could spend the winters when you retired is gone. You feel deprived-understandably in the context of the Great American Dream-which is not dead, by the way--only deeper into dreams. You used to consider yourself a generous person, but gee whiz, you still have two cars to keep going and the dirt bike, and now the dirty sumbitches in State government or the Feds. want to up and raise taxes when you are barely getting by, and even before the sh*t hit the fan, you couldn't a bought the dirt bike, or the faster computer, or the Martin guitar if your money was all going for taxes...and as you get worse off, and don't think you can afford more taxes, some one who was already way worse off than you now has to pay a $3.00 Medicaid co-pay for medicines. What's three dollars? When you're disabled or sick and on Welfare that pays $276 a month for you and your kids to pay rent, utilities, etc, and you have to take 4 different psychotropic drugs for your mental illness, one for your blood pressure and one for the osteoarthritis that is beginning to cripple your hands, that $25=4.00 in medicaid co-pays is almost 10% of your monthly income. Then the tags come due on the car you have to have becasue there is no mass transit to get you to the grocery store or the doctor' office and the car insurance get cancelled for non-payment, but the kids have to eat and you have to get to the doctor so you drive on expired tags with no insurance and get pulled by the state trooper and are now going to have to come up with $275 for the fine, plus still get the tags renewed and the insurance reinstated....

Folks--like Bobert, I'm a social worker--been at it almost 35 years now. This scenerio is pretty typical. And it has a cascade effect that is felt around the world in our now global economy.