From 100K lawyer to 450 week unemployment

[Liberal_in_LA]

This bleak landscape is leading more middle-class families, like the Tanners, to turn to government assistance programs.

The family's economic slide began in August when Heather Tanner lost a $100,000-a-year job. Her husband, Carl, 43, had been a stay-at-home dad for their 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter, so the loss of her income forced the family to rely on her $450-a-week unemployment benefits for food, shelter and utilities.

"It's a strange world I find myself in, to go from making $100,000 a year to making $24,000 a year," said Tanner, who has found some contract legal work and part-time jobs but nothing solid in the past seven months.

How many people have been pushed out of homes or apartments because of unemployment is unknown. But with 2.4 million Californians out of work, and an unprecedented 35 percent of them falling into the long-term unemployment bracket, the distress is intense, said Jean Ross with the California Budget Project in Sacramento.

"People are staying unemployed much longer, and even if they had a cushion they're burning through it," she said.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/23/BUUO1CI40P.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0j1o6pMgV