With the financial meltdown everyone is running around like Chicken Little waiting to be hit on the head with their piece of the broken sky.
I would like for everyone to take a deep breath, calm down, and realize that the government is able to continue to dysfunction by keeping us in a state of fear. Those who lived through the real depression must think us fools to be crying so loudly over the loss of credit; the ability to buy things that cannot contribute to our basic survival paid for by money we haven't even earned yet.
However today I would like to  touch on something I have been waiting days for someone else to bring up. In all the finger-pointing, poor-me whining that's been going on, the issue of state and local property taxes has been relegated to a non-issue. I take exception to this. I recently moved out of Indianapolis where the property tax rate increased for many by more than 300%. No, the number of zeros is not a typo. Many people saw their escrow accounts demand $200, $300, and even a $1000 more a month to satisfy the craving of local government to spend more and more and get less and less. Like a gigantic, never-satisfied tapeworm, the local governments forced people to give up their homes not because of a lack of mortgage payments, but because of the literal serf-like circumstances forced upon the tax payers. While the local schools were re-decorated with top-quality porcelain tile and brand new astro-turf for the football field, the rest of us made do with linoleum and crabgrass. Of course, that's only if you can afford to keep your house at all.
I know there are states that have no property taxes, but in the greater scheme of things the National Concious needs to remember that we not only render unto Caesar, we also render unto Caesar's minions until we are finally ground into poverty and despair by the governmental institutions who have taken us down this road.
People want to complain that the free market and Capitolism dosen't work and unbridled greed got us to this point.
I would argue that we haven't had a free market since the early part of the 20th century, and it is the greed of governments, local, state and federal, that have caused the mess we're in right now. And yet we will see 90% of the incumbents in our various levels of governments re-hired this fall so they can cause even more damage.

I would call this "just my two cents" but the devaluation of our national money actually makes it "just my 1.01 cents".