Roughly until it’s the majority view of publishers’ style guides that there’s a verb “to impact” (meaning “to affect”)<grin>, my free-lance work (i moonlight as a copy-editor of college-level scientific and technical textbooks) will almost certainly not be hurt by the poor economy—in fact, seeing that people are evidently judging that re-training and additional education are appropriate uses for a spell of unemployment, the amount of work that is offered to me might well increase, and i’ve seen no evidence of a fall in payment rates. i grant, however, that my situation is probably unusual.