When I was leaving Las Vegas (don’t break into song), I encountered a guy on the elevator who was talking to his friend about his loss of home equity. “It’s like playing at the casino,” the man said. “You have a bunch of chips, and after a few hands, you look down, and they’re gone.”

This was a common theme at the Netroots Nation conference. Not specifically a guy relating home equity to a loss of blackjack chips, but attendees casually mentioning their interactions with people in Nevada who are struggling. Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney, in a superior piece, basically extend out that anecdata by talking to numerous residents about the state of things in Nevada during the Great Recession. They muse that the reality of Nevada could equal the future of America.

On a cul-de-sac in the once-pleasant neighborhood of Silverado Ranch, Larry Wood is the last remaining resident. Two of the four homes are in foreclosure and a third is a “party rental” only occupied by rowdy tourists on weekends. One of his neighbors made a few bucks before abandoning the home, he says. “They sold all the palm trees and just walked away from it,” says Wood, sporting a “Freedom Isn’t Free” T-shirt. “It’s a great neighborhood. I guess that people weren’t financially set up to get through the crash.”

Wood takes little comfort in being the last resident. “Sometimes it’s scary. There’s a possibility someone would try to rob me and I wouldn’t have any neighbors to help me,” he says, recounting a previous attempted intrusion when his then-neighbor called to warn him not to answer the door because there was a group of thugs knocking. Armed and ready, he huddled near the door but the gang gave up and left.

You don’t have to go far to find these stories in Nevada, where the unemployment rate sits at 14.2%, and where nearly 6% of all homes received a foreclosure filing in the first half of the year.

This is a heartbreaking story, and I urge you to read all of it. But sadly enough, Grim and Delaney’s thesis about this being the future of America isn’t all that hard to predict. The White House’s Mid-Session Budget Review predicted 9% unemployment by the end of 2011, and won’t fall below 6% until 2015. But that last bit seems like a wishful scenario. Corporations have figured out how to make money while keeping labor costs down, raising the spectre of long-term structural unemployment. An entire generation of Americans, known as “Generation Y,” is experiencing a lack of jobs, ballooning loans, and a difficult future. The unemployment rate for those aged 20-24 was 15.3%, which significantly retards their career growth and earning potential.

This may not be able to last. I don’t know how you can have consumer confidence down and corporate profits up well into the future. Consumer spending makes up too much of the US economy. At some point, corporations have to give the people some money so they can buy their wares. And maybe the unemployed can organize and take out, one by one, those whose policies are threatening their hope.

Among the biggest sites in the unemployment netroots is LayoffList, managed by Michael Thornton, a native of Rochester, N.Y. Thornton stared LayoffList in 2008; five months ago, he began writing articles and posting legislators’ information. He now receives hundreds of emails and has logged more than a million hits. Thornton is finding that, rather than losing interest in politics since the end of the fight for extended benefits, the unemployed are “energized and motivated” and have started looking forward to the fall.

“Even Republicans say they aren’t voting Republican anymore,” the soft-spoken former technical writer says. “You have millions of unemployed people out there. If even half of them voted, they could swing a nationwide election.”

What I know is this: the middle class has been gutted from the inside, and without a mass movement created to stop those doing the deed, we could submit millions in the middle class to a horrible fate.