Last week we established that debt lifts young folks’ self esteem. The next step along this ridiculous path, of course, is that our struggling economy needs — wait for it — more credit-card debt.
USA Today: More Credit Card Debt Might Be Good…
I find this line of thinking fascinating, really. No one has any money; no one has any savings to speak of; no one is spending; thus, the economic recovery is faltering. The answer? More debt. That’s what it’ll take to get people spending now.
Forget saving money and slowly repairing Joe Sixpack’s household balance sheet, so recently decimated by house-price declines and more than ten years of rollercoastering stock markets. No, what’s important is that those credit cards come back out and start lighting up cash registers again.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
And I’m particularly enthralled with this last chunk of the article. Here we’re introduced to a Houston couple who’ve decided, apparently, that carrying $15k in plasti-debt is no reason to not “go get some stuff” again:
Only in America would you find someone who’d rung up $30k in credit-card debt lamenting the sad, sad state of “not having things.”
My question: Which one of Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps says to reduce your credit-card debt by half — to a level that’s still five digits’ worth, mind you — and then go out and charge a grill and some Dockers at Target?
Hmmph. I totally missed that one.
Mike wrote:
this just goes to show that we learn nothing from history
SPJ wrote:
Wow. I am simply speechless. I mean, I know people out there think like this but, it’s just so frightening to read it. I guess for some, it takes a huge emergency for the light to finally click. Just glad my light clicked before something terrible happened.