Thanks, President Bush

For the last 8 years, my husband has worked for a subsidiary of a large multi-national conglomerate (whom everyone has heard of). The division he's been in is losing one of their biggest clients - the one he's been working with. Initially, it looked like when that office closed down, it would be pretty easy for him to get a job working with one of their other clients. Today, however, he learned that none of the other divisions has reached anywhere near their growth expectations because of the complete wreck President Bush has made of our economy, so the company won't be adding any new positions to those clients' teams.

The client teams aren't small, either - there will be a fairly good number of people being laid off with this office's closing, and if they want to keep jobs within the company, it'll have to be the result of individual turnover - other current employees in these other departments quitting and needing to be replaced. There will be a lot of competition.

A few years back, the company faced this same problem with the first client he worked with - and a new client came along at the last minute which saved his job. Unfortuantely, because of the lousy economy, that doesn't appear to be a reasonable hope this time around.

So, in two months, my husband will be out of work. He'll get modest severence pay, of course, and my disability checks will keep on coming, but even if he finds a new job right away, it's unlikely it will pay quite as well, and, of course, benefits won't kick in right away. That means we'll either have to do without health insurance until he gets a new job and their benefits kick in - which can be hard to do under the best circumstances, and those aren't what we have here; or we'll have to pay for continuing coverage under his old plan - which we can barely afford to do.

Right now, I'm just feeling rather down in the dumps about the whole thing. The prospect of my husband having to find a new job in this economy is really scary. I hope things will go quickly, but who knows.