I’ve worked hard all of my life.

Most people can make this claim, so I’m not special. In life, I’ve experienced my share of ups and downs. Some of the lows were self-induced while others could be attributed to happenstance. The same can be said for the highs.

Source: Trading Economics - United States Unemployment Rate Chart

Except for one period of unemployment, I’ve worked continually since my first job at the local bodega at 14. As an adult, I’ve worked for some great companies, so my family has access to health insurance through my job. We live in a modest home with only two hundred and nineteen payments remaining on our mortgage. A number of payments have been late in recent years, but we’ve somehow managed to hang on. My 401(k) plan has even reclaimed some of the losses that it sustained during the stock market slump of a few years ago.

The American dream is possible.

As many would attest, making it through the last few years has been a struggle. Fortunately, for my family, we are not among the hardest hit by the faltering economy. When assessing my situation I can say, unequivocally, that hard work has not been the determining factor.

Lots of people can tell a very different story that begins the same as mine, “I’ve worked hard all of my life.”

Their stories, however, include things like:

• losing a job and their health insurance;
• getting sick and having to sell their homes to pay for their treatment;
• having the interest on their adjustable rate mortgages jacked up to unmanageable levels and falling behind.

If those of us who are not experiencing these nightmare scenarios are unwilling to pitch-in and help our friends and neighbors, I ask you, what is a country for?

What is a country for if good fortune is mistakenly viewed as self-sufficiency? Those who claim that results are determined solely by individual action are massaging their egos. The false dichotomy of this “cause and effect” argument prompts much of the irrationality and short-sightedness of the conservative ideology. I can recall many instances in my life where things could have easily gone another way, and there was nothing that I could have done about it.

People tend to project their circumstance upon others when making judgments:

“I have a job, so why can’t she get one.”
“I pay my mortgage, so why should the government help those that have fallen behind.”
“I have health insurance, so I’m not paying for yours.”

To those people I ask, what is a country for?

Are we just a loose collection of people bound together by nothing? Is the idea of having a safety net so repugnant that every effort to strengthen it should be shouted down?

Had there been a Tea Party uprising in response to unfunded mandates like the wars, prescription benefits, and tax cuts that mostly benefited the rich, I would be able to take them more seriously now. To me, their message of fiscal responsibility is no more than a clumsy cover for their general displeasure with being out of power. Moreover, their message is often mean-spirited in nature and devoid of hope. For the concept of unemployment benefits to be viewed as a bail out, is to miss the point entirely.

Source: National Priorities Project - Cost of War

If we do not care for the fates of our neighbors, why should we continue the charade? One cannot love their country, but hate the people that are in it. Hard work helps, but hard work alone, as many of us know, guarantees nothing.

Do we really want to become a country where everyone is basically on their own?

If so, I ask again, what is a country for?

As a consequence of the slumping economy, you’ve probably made some modifications to your behavior.

With prices uniformly increasing at rates that far outpace the average person’s salary, you have had little choice but to adapt – even if you’ve managed to remain employed throughout the last couple of years.

Your economic wellness could depend on it.

I’ve become more budget conscious and have cut back wherever I could. I began by making the easy choices.

• Bargain hunting
• Coupon clipping
• Turning off lights
• No new clothes
• No eating out

These measures helped, but they did not alleviate the strains related to balancing a household budget. The choices got harder. I began to defer things like car maintenance, which can lead to more expensive problems in the future.  When feeling squeezed, something has to give.

Recently, the regulatory powers that be loosened the reins on the electric companies in Pennsylvania. My provider, PP&L Electric Utilities, wasted no time in rolling out their new pricing. This chart shows the increases in per kilowatt hour pricing in my electric bills over the last six months.

That’s a whopping 29% increase overall. Even with winter pricing added into the mix, how is this level of increase even remotely justifiable?

During the most recent billing cycle we logged 6,000 kilowatt hours.

Electric choice is available, but shopping for and locking in contracts with electric generation suppliers is an added complexity in an area where it doesn’t need to be.

This is a budget buster.

If you have gone through the process of selecting an electric generation supplier, in Pennsylvania, or in another state, I’m interested in hearing how you have fared and whether you believe that electric choice is beneficial to consumers.

Here’s a portion of a conversation that I overheard while grabbing a quick smoke outside of my office this afternoon:

• Person A – “You know that stimulus? All they had to do was give $200 grand to every American and that would stimulate the economy!”

• Person B – “Yeah!”

• Person C – “That would do it.”

This is not the first time that I have heard this suggestion. This kind of solution is usually offered by people who aspire to construct their opinions using the rule of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). A closer look at the suggestion reveals that @ $200,000 per American, the suggested bailout would total roughly $60 trillion dollars. Hm, let’s see. That’s eighty five times the $700 billion dollar bailout amount. Really? That can’t be right, can it?

Sadly it is. The per-American share of $700 billion would be about $2,500. Doesn’t seem like such a good plan at this level, huh?.

Whatever one’s view on the bank bailout, and there are many, one teensy weensy detail is missing from the “bailout every American” idea.

The bailout is supposed to be repaid!

Does every American wish to be loaned $2,500 by Uncle Sam? Sure, there would be many takers, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into viewing it as free money.

The banks can’t wait to repay the bailouts! Who can blame them? They are directly in the cross-hairs of everyone who has a problem with Wall Street, which means that practically everyone hates them. Those poor bankers are everyone’s favorite villain in this whole economic mess. The threat of special fees and taxes being imposed on their humongous bonuses are making them very uneasy. I feel for them. Really, I do. Don’t you?

As I exhaled my last drag, I knew that I didn’t have the heart to put a damper on the group’s new found populist fervor, so I let it slide and went about my business. Who ever said that it was my job to snap people back to reality anyway?