Pay up or take the bus 2718

Getting to work is not "non-essential" travel in my book - I don't care if you live across the street from where you work, or 100 miles away (I myself have a 45 - 60 mile one-way commute, the exact distance depends on the route I take, which in turn depends on traffic). It seems worthwhile to me to try to cut commuting expenses by carpooling if that's possible (I do that and it saves $70-$80 a week) and such a course of action almost automatically conserves fuel (my carpool saves anywhere from 10 to 20 gallons of gas a week). If you can make such arrangements and don't, it's you who have to accept the consequences. I have to admit my motives in carpooling aren't noble, patriotic, or altruistic - I do it out of pure and simple immediate self interest, to save money.

A popular weekend pbutttime when I was younger was to go out for a drive - no particular destination in mind, no activity planned, just wander around the countryside. I don't know if that's still popular with certain segments of the population, but if it is, I'd suggest that such travel is non-essential. The biggest parking lot in my town is around the local high school - it's for the students to park their cars. Considering that there's taxpayer supported bus service almost from their front doors to the door of the school, I'm a little hard put to consider most of that student driving "essential". I'm sure that you can come up with a few examples of your own.

And the employment situation is, as you put it, less than ideal - I've been trying to hire nine clinical programmers who are proficient in SAS for a year now at salaries from 50k to 95k depending on experience (the 50k is for zero experience other than a six month clbuttroom training course). After a year, I've managed to find six. Collegues in the office have had similar problems finding data managers, project managers, data mappers and the like. It's not like the company was located at the tail end of nowhere - we're in the urban area of the fifth largest city in the US.

I have to point out that "the government" doesn't make you live any particular place or prescribe your line of work - if there are no jobs in your area or no jobs in your field, why, in the name of anything you hold dear, wouldn't you change either or both? (Some of the people I've hired come from half a world away - legal immigrants from Eurasia who have become citizens of the US - next to that, what's 40 miles?) If you want the government to give you a job, perhaps you might consider joining the armed services, I hear they're having recruiting difficulties.