The Real American Nightmare

As always, I’m behind on all the blogs again. Here’s a Digby post from Tuesday, linking to this article and talking about possibly the most pressing issue in the country, debt.

It isn't taxes that are keeping American up at night and it probably isn't jobs, at least on a massive scale. It isn't even terrorism or the war.

It's debt. People are going to be looking for some help with this problem and one place to start would be to rein in these avaricious credit card companies who got a nice handsome payoff with that heinous bankruptcy bill. This is an issue to which average Americans can relate: greedy credit card companies who can literally raise your rates for any reason at all causing your debt to cascade from manageable to overwhelming overnight. It wouldn't be hard to fix. There used to be laws against usury --- we can just dust them off.

This would require, of course, going up against the banking and finance lobby. The votes are waiting for the guy or gal who has the nerve to take a populist stance on this. Who out there has the juice to do that?

One of the best qualities of The Butterfly is her outright phobia of debt. Not that others don’t have it, but the decisions we’ve made since getting married last April have mostly revolved around avoiding debt while we still can. We moved in with her parents last summer (that was actually my decision, not hers) and we’re making double and triple payments on my car (congratulate us: we’ll have my car paid off next week instead of June 2008 when the last payment was to be due...WOOHOO!). Now, thanks go also to my parents...because of them I’m not saddled with student loans, and that’s positively huge. But nonetheless, we’ll be debt free in a week, which puts us in the 1% or so of the population that can say that. Part of it was luck and circumstance, but part of it was conscious choice.

Friends of mine in St. Louis have car payments, house payments, and loan payments...working 3 jobs despite the fact that their full-time job is quite nice. And they don’t even have kids yet. This is going to be a huge deal, and digby’s right—Democrats (led by the ever-principled Joe Biden) whore themselves out to credit card companies just as badly as Republicans do, and that’s extremely unfortunate. I’m hoping my mostly-pampered generation produces politicians who are much more realistic about dealing with the present tense, but that hope isn’t all that strong at this point.

(And while we’re on the subject of Digby posts...and, for that matter, nightmares...remember berlin niebuhr’s posts about defining the extremes of the debate? Well, some Democrat politician/spokesperson...any Democrat politican/spokesperson...needs to speak up and define the extreme left perspective, and stat. Neocons—who, as Digby has always said, have been wrong about every single prediction for the last ten years—are succeeding at defining Condi as an appeaser. That should frighten everybody to the left of center into immediate action. But, of course, it won’t.)