One of the reasons this recession is having such a powerful psychological impact is that it's battering families across the income scale. The poor are hit hard, of course. But it wasn't primarily the poor who ended up overextending on mortgages and seeing their beautiful new homes foreclosed. That's been a primarily middle class phenomenon, and you're seeing the effects now as refugees from the professional class line up outside food banks because they can't afford anything beyond their mortgages or they've lost their construction job but not their need for groceries.
