For what it’s worth.

I bartend in a locals/working class bar in Massachusetts in a ‘all right’ town.

A lot of customers are collecting unemployment, and liking it, as it almost approaches the post tax take home pay, without the workey hassle thing.

I expect a serious crunch when these unemployment extensions stop. That’s when you’ll see the spending hit the fan. Around Christmas, I’d say.

People are spending/cashing in 401K’s and the like.

No one talks of buying a new car. Many said they’d wouldn’t minded having a ‘clunker’.

Near everyone seems to hate both parties.

Town and government workers are imperial and just don’t get what’s going on. I know a lumber company that laid off half of it’s near hundred employees. Not a peep in the paper, however there was a story about the hundred member police dept laying off a couple of dispatchers. The towns are still borrowing and building ten/forty million dollar buildings to house paper shufflers, bureaucrats, code enforcers, committees and who knows what. None of them mow a lawn, cook a breakfast, empty a bed pan, turn a wrench but they do snow down ever deeper forms, rules, regulations, ordinances. Everything is illegal unless expressly permitted after a multi year review ‘process’ with uncertain outcome.

People here are looking at Trulia and Zillow at house prices in Florida and Texas, so I expect those states will have their houses bought up. People want out of high tax, bureaucratic, overstaffed Massachusetts.

I’m starting to hear Detroit like stories of parents just giving their houses to the kids as they can’t sell them anyways in certain parts of Massachusetts. Kind of like spreading inkspots of declining jobs/incomes/housing prices.

You want a boat, sailboat, jet ski, Harley, RV, gun, anything? People are dumping their toys. A good, rich friend just bought a 45′ sportfish for 150K cash, that would of gone for half a mill, easy a few years ago.

A lot of people have had, for no to little reason, either their credit cards canceled or limits set to what they owe. People have had their rate go from 14 percent to high 20′s all the time reading about Citibank, AIG, and others getting Federal money that will be paid by their kids.

So, savings wiped out, homes either underwater or appreciation gone, incomes declining or stagnate. More taxes and higher fines, fees, permits coming. More rules regulations, ordinances. Huge un funded pensions and a shakey dollar.

Mr. American consumer is on financial injured reserve for the next season or two and it’s uncertain if he’ll ever return to the pro spending league.