Lake County, Indiana

This "Steel Belt" area of the northern Midwest is another example of a dying breed in America that has become all too common in the last 20 years. Lake County is known for it's past historical achievements in gaining government contracts throughout 2 World Wars and the "Reaganomics" stockpiling of arms throughout the 1980's. The area prides itself on being one of the centers of steel and Industrial production along the "Steel Belt" from Erie, Pa up to Green Bay, Wi. However, in the last 15 years, the area continues to inflict misery upon it's inhabitants with it's increasing inflation of pricing in everything from rent ceilings to the subsidy of local unions, who hold politicians at a "gunpoint business" stance so as to continue their stranglehold upon the area's economy. Murder rates have continued to skyrocket in Lake County's cities such as Gary, Hammond and Merrillville, and the oversensitive Black community seems all to eager to pull out their freshly minted "race cards" to bait their way into local jobs and housing markets they intend to later destroy with drugs, gangbangers and lack of work ethic. Long past are the ghosts of "the American Dream" in this area, because quite frankly, a person CANNOT attain a decent job that adequately pays the high taxes and will allow that person to ascend their socio-economic ladder individually. In Lake County, labor unions hold basically all decent waged jobs and have established a vicious "glass ceiling" of hegemony over politics and society at large. Unskilled part time workers are victimized in terms of job availibility to biased companies that wish to hire insincere, lazy minorities to meet their "equal opportunity diversity status quo". This broken economy coupled with physically overcrowded, filthy, crime riddled streets makes this quite possibly the worst choice for a young person wishing to make something of themselves while trying to raise a family.