For a few years now, pot has been legal in Colorado, and as expected, the economy here is booming, and I do mean BOOMING. Businesses are coming here to open new offices, unemployment is very low, and everything looks great to everyone outside of Colorado. The problem is that the cost of living in Colorado is skyrocketing with housing costs going up nearly 10% every year, and the cost of groceries, and everything else going up at nearly the same rate...and there's the problem. For the upper class and the upper middle class, this means that they're making tons of extra money. The problem comes for people in the lower class, like me and my family. We're expecting our rent to jump by at least 10% this winter. The problem is that we didn't get 10% raises this year...nothing even close, and I know a lot of other poor people who are really struggling in this booming economy.
And before anyone tries to quote social Darwinism, some people can't help their economic circumstances. For ourselves, it was very important that we weren't both working full time, that way one of us would always be here with the kids. We see too many kids running around, getting in trouble, because their parents aren't home. This isn't what we wanted for our kids, so we chose to make less money. Through all of our financial troubles, we've done everything we can to avoid government aid. We pay for our health insurance because we get better health care options, and because we've racked up so many medical bills, we're both working more than we'd planned...and because of that, we don't qualify for food aid. Let me explain that again...we made a choice to not be on government health insurance...as a result, we have massive bills that we're trying to pay off. In order to pay them off, we're both working extra, and because we're working extra, we can't get government help. That's right, we're busting our asses to do everything we can to stay off of the government dollar, and because of that, when we actually needed help, we couldn't qualify.
We, and many like us, were barely scraping by before pot was legalized, and now with all of the growth we're seeing, we struggle every month to keep a roof over our heads.
In order to put food on the table, I'm picking up any freelance editing work I can (contact me if you are interested) and Rebecca is having to donate plasma twice a week. She has to be stuck by a needle twice a week just so our kids can eat. This isn't what America is supposed to be.
Our biggest hope is that we have a really severe winter and some of the people that have moved here will move to warmer states that have legal pot. It's rather sad that in order for our family to make it, we have to hope that the economy crashes. This is what legalized pot has done to Colorado, at least the poor of Colorado...
