Debt

Reading Gene Lyons' opinion piece, "America's Addiction to Debt," in Salon this evening reminded me of the few minutes of Oprah I watched this afternoon. Suze Orman was on the show telling women how to get out of debt; the woman on the hot seat had 23(!) credit cards; she had racked up thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, took out a loan (or money out of her 401(k)--I don't remember exactly where she got that money) to pay down that debt, but then she immediately racked up additional credit card debt to the total of $79,000.

I sat there with my mouth open. I can understand if one were suddenly confronted with serious medical issues that insurance wouldn't cover. But that much money just spent on stuff? And she's not alone; our country is full of people like her. Earlier this week I caught the re-run of the documentary House of Cards about the housing bubble, the mortgage brokers who helped convince people to buy homes they couldn't afford, and the sleazy Wall Street types who bundled those mortgages into toxic assets to sell to investors, banking on the hope that housing prices would continue to go up and that folks would pay their mortgages. People re-financed their houses to build swimming pools, to upgrade their kitchens, to landscape their backyards, and to buy more stuff. Then they discovered they couldn't afford their lifestyles.

And, as Lyons points out in his essay, "we're all stuck paying for it."