After college I left Montana to find work. A year or two later I desperately wanted to return home but couldn’t find a job that covered rent. While visiting my then boyfriend at his father’s home on Flathead Lake, we went out to a bar. I was introduced to one of his father’s friends, one of those retiree transplants to a beautiful part of the state, (the county with the highest per capita income and the poorest record of passing school levies). He was the kind of person known in certain circles as “A Golfing Republican”. He looked me straight in the eye and said “You have no problems here.”
This was a year or so after the stock market crashed spectacularly just as naive newly minted college grads such as myself were entering the job market. I remember overhearing one of my ambitious well-educated housemates sobbing on the phone; “so tired of watching the clock day after day” at her receptionist job and actually being told to her face that she must “be patient and wait 2 or 3 years” until the baby boomers ahead of her were promoted out of the jobs for which she was qualified. Without the perspective of age and experience, I heard so much about the importance of being productive (a word that had never once been spoken in my presence as I pursued my liberal arts degree at a university) that I believed I was failing to the point that I would face a firing line and be executed for my crime of not being productive.
If Hank Paulson gets his money from Congress then Wall Street will be fine and the executives can retire to beautiful locations. BUT THERE WILL BE PROBLEMS THERE.