Year: 2011

The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner on the debt ceiling limit by linking Congressional approval to raise the ceiling to a strict program of spending cuts with no tax increases.

Let’s set aside for one instant the fact that only through tax increases to fund greater spending will we start creating jobs again because, as recent history shows, when rich folk have more money from lower taxes, they keep it for themselves, whereas the government either gives it to people to spend or invests it in infrastructure.  And let’s set aside the fact that we now have the lowest taxes in the history of the industrialized West and that lowering taxes these past 30+ years has led to a transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.  And let’s ignore for the time being that lower taxes have led to the increase in borrowing, which creates safe investment harbors for the rich folk who have the extra money because their taxes are too low.  

Let’s focus instead on the sheer lunacy of linking a procedural issue—raising the debt ceiling—with a discussion about the future direction of the country.

The Republicans in Congress have tied themselves so closely to the radically right-wing views of the Tea-partiers that they simply cannot vote to raise taxes or to take on more debt, lest they risk looking like Judas-inspired hypocrites.

So the Republicans have this untenable position of having to choose between the firing squad of taking responsibility for an unnecessary default that would lead to economic chaos and the deep plunge into the sea attached to a 600-pound lead anchor of voting for more debt and maybe higher taxes.  

The current way out for Republicans, as expressed yesterday by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is for Congress to abdicate its responsibility for raising the debt limit to the President.  With McConnell’s plan, Congress will have the theoretical ability to overrule a Presidential decision to raise the debt limit, but it’ll be about as easy to do as herding 500 unleashed cats through a forest.

Mitch gives everyone what they want:  We avoid a major economic explosion and the Republicans don’t have to vote to raise taxes or the debt ceiling.  Everyone can go back to bickering about trivialities while our nation slowly declines into a society of haves and have-nots.

It’s a standard Republican answer that Democrats also tend to favor, especially in foreign affairs: Let the executive branch do it.  But if Congress keeps abdicating rights and privileges to the President, pretty soon our legislative branch will have no ability to counteract the desires of the executive and we’ll have a dictatorship in which the dictator is elected every four years from a small circle of those wealthy and connected enough to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to mince out an endless stream of 9-second and 30-second messages.

The truly distressing note in this opera buffa is the one sung by the general public.  According to the latest survey by the Pew Research Center, the country is almost equally divided among those who worry more about the debt ceiling not being raised (42%) and those who worry more about the possibility that raising the debt limit will lead to more spending and bigger debt (47%).  (FYI, nothing to worry about there: it will happen!)

The trouble with the survey, like so many, is that it never asks an explicit question, such as, “Do you think the debt ceiling should be raised or do you think the country will be better off risking default?”  If asked explicitly, a lot of people might come to the conclusion that Mitch McConnell did:  Let’s raise it, but don’t blame me.

The survey does show that many more people are worried about raising the debt ceiling than a few months ago.  But still, it’s clear that many Americans are surprisingly ignorant of basic business principles.  When you can’t borrow money and you have frequent cash flow needs or are temporarily spending more than you make, then you go out of business or you reorganize in bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy stains a company’s, and a country’s, reputation, makes it harder to do business and means you have to pay more to borrow money in the future. 

Now maybe you can’t keep spending more than you make, but until you have a plan in place to take in more revenues and/or cut spending, you have to keep surviving as a business and as a country.

So we have to raise the debt ceiling now, regardless of what we do later.  That many of us are not aware of that obvious fact results at least in part from the lies and distortions that Republicans have been spewing about the economy for decades.

If anyone had any doubt about the racial bias of the current recession, the Associated Press article that came out this past weekend should be an epiphany, a revelation or the nail in the coffin.  There can be no doubt: African-Americans are being hurt worse than others in our current economic turmoil.   

This paragraph from the AP story says it all:

Economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the EPI.

The article reports that since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent.

The polite lawyer might call it disparate impact.  I prefer an expression I first heard years ago in the stacks of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee library at 3:00 am while planning a demonstration for the next day: institutional racism.

Disparate impact is when a negative impact, predicted or unforeseen, is not planned, such as when a last-hired-first-fired policy leads to a layoff primarily affecting African-Americans and other minorities.  Institutional racism means racism that is built into the system. 

The question is not what to do to help African-Americans come back from the recession.

We know what will work: greater support of public education; funneling more students into vocational and technical high schools; making sure all children have adequate nutrition and medical care; increased spending on job-creating infrastructure improvements. 

The real question is, how do we elect leaders who will do these things, instead of the current bunch who seem more interested in protecting the vested interests of the entrenched moneyed classes?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, now: we have to get the poor, minorities, those under 30 and the unemployed to vote, and to vote for progressive candidates. 

Another study reported over the past weekend proves the obvious: that most unemployed people don’t vote.  It’s obvious because the unemployed tend to be the poor, minorities and young people, all groups that traditionally don’t vote. 

Getting non-voters to the polls takes three basic tactics:

1. Educate non-voters in simple, slogan-like messages about the progressive stands on Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, public schools, unemployment benefits, and unions, and let them know which candidates are supporting progressive positions.
2. Fight for open voting rights: motor voter, expanded absentee possibilities, no ID, restored rights to ex-cons, paper ballots, same-day registration.
3. Rent vans—lots of them—and take potential nonvoters to the polls on election day.  Send fleets of vans into inner cities and onto college campuses and take the voters to their voting polls.

One of the themes in the news this week has been the haggling over higher miles-per-gallon standards between the Obama Administration and U.S. automakers.  The most comprehensive reports have been in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

As usual, the Obama Administration proposal is mild and industry-friendly.  Raising the U.S. fleet average to 56.2 MPG by 2025 makes us slackers when we compared to the 60 MPG that European countries intend to reach by 2020.  But getting five more years to underachieve Europe by more than 6% isn’t good enough for U.S. carmakers, at least in their U.S. markets.  Remember that Ford, GM and Chrysler will certainly reach the European standard for the cars they sell in Europe rather than exit those markets.

Carmakers are making the ridiculous claim that consumers won’t purchase what will be smaller and more expensive cars.  The claim is ridiculous, because if high fuel efficiency autos are all that’s available, then that’s what people will buy.  Additionally, with the price of gasoline going up, consumers are already trending towards smaller vehicles.  Finally, let’s not forget that larger vehicles can also become more fuel efficient, although never as fuel efficient as a smaller car using the same set of technologies.

According to the Times article, there are already indications that the Administration will back down.  Evidently an anonymous inside source is saying that 56.2 MPG is a negotiating position only. 

As Cassandra Peterson, AKA Elvira Mistress of the Dark, would say, “Hello, it’s like déjà vu.”

In 1977, Jimmy Carter’s Department of Transportation mandated airbags (or automatic seatbelts) by 1983.  Carmakers protested, saying that consumers wouldn’t pay the extra money for extra safety.  Industry-supported propaganda proposed the truly absurd notion that airbags weren’t so safe.  The Reagan Administration reversed its direction on the issue several times and it wasn’t until deep into the Clinton Administration in 1994 that all cars sold in the United States had to have airbags, on the driver’s side.

It sure seems as if history is repeating itself, doesn’t it?

Buttressing the carmakers’ position are 15 governors, 14 of them Republicans, who recently sent a letter to the Administration asking it to slow down the transition to more fuel efficient vehicles.  Let’s take a look at their two main arguments; my refutations are in italics:

1. The governors say that Americans need their big gas-guzzlers to transport cargo such as “skis, farm equipment and children’s car seats.” How are they managing in Europe, where I understand some farming is done and lots of people ski?  It’s because a) the car companies there are developing technologies that cut fuel consumption; and b) Europeans are used to driving smaller cars, something Americans will have to get used to doing if we want to address the challenge of man-induced global warming.
2. The governors also worry that consumers will postpone new car purchases so they can keep their gas guzzlers, thus threatening automotive manufacturing jobs and postponing compliance.   Maybe it was in a dream, but didn’t this same group of 15 oppose the ending of tax subsidies for buggy whip makers 130 years ago because it threatened jobs? (LOL)  Seriously folks, any loss of jobs will be temporary, because sooner or later, all cars wear down. The argument that tougher standards will take longer to meet is also a red herring, since some consumers will postpone new purchases no matter what the standard.  With a lower standard, the actual energy savings will undoubtedly be lower, just as 75% of 90 is less than 75% of 100. 

Let’s face it, the auto industry and its political lackeys don’t like change.  You make a lot more money making superficial changes to your products and selling them year after year than you do when you have to invest in developing new technologies and retooling production lines.  In other words, carmakers think they’ll make more money if they don’t have to abide by a higher standard.

But the higher MPG standard is absolutely necessarily, and the sooner the better.  Car emissions are the second most significant cause of environmental degradation and global warming (burning fuel for electricity is number one).  If we continue to burn gasoline as if it were water or air, the result is going to be a horror story so frightening that not even Elvira will want to want to watch it.

The Declaration of Independence asserts that all people have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  We often distill this powerful phrase and the holiday of July 4th into one word: freedom.  For example, I just inputted “July 4th + freedom” into Google and found more than 12.5 million responses.  Inputting “Declaration of Independence + freedom” into Google yields more than 9 million hits (and the word does not appear in the document).

But often people bandy about freedom as a cover for selfishness: freedom from taxation, freedom from regulation, freedom to pollute; even freedom for people with a history of mental illness to carry guns (a truly scary National Rifle Association sponsored movement analyzed in a fine article in this past Sunday’s New York Times.)

In their pursuit of their own selfish ends, many people nowadays forget that with freedom comes responsibility—responsibility to fellow human beings, the community and the Earth.  For the past 30 some odd years, we have lived in a great age of selfishness, as exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s favorite joke about two people who see a bear in the woods.  The first says, “I hope we can we outrun the bear,” to which the second says, “I just have to outrun you.”

I’ve been visiting Toronto this past week, relying on the wonderful mass transit system.  In taking an escalator from the subway platform to street level at rush hour, I had an experience that really symbolized to me how selfish we have become in the United States.  It may seem like a small thing to some readers, but maybe not.

Let me preface my story with the fact that I am a dedicated walker.  When I get on an escalator or a people mover, I want to keep walking. 

In the United States, virtually every time I take an escalator or people mover during rush times there are people standing across the width of the conveyor, and often when I say, politely, “Excuse me,” so I can keep moving, they frown at me or look at me as if I were crazy.  Once in the Washington, D.C. subway, a man got very hostile, as if I was the offending party.  A few minutes later, a woman who looked to be his significant other came over to me on the platform to apologize, saying that he didn’t know one was supposed to stand right to let other people move by on the left. The excuse didn’t hold water, since their clothes and shopping bags from upscale stores suggested that they probably ride a people mover at an airport from time to time and so have heard that ubiquitous recorded chant of “stand right so people can walk left.” 

Now to Canada:  The escalator had people standing on it packed tight on every step from bottom to top, and every one of them was standing right and squeezing to the wall a little, so that people could move by them!!!  By the way, there was no sign telling them to stand right. 

In other words, people were thinking of others and their needs.

A little thing, you might say, but let’s remember that Canadians contribute more to the common good through paying higher taxes, which fund Toronto’s extensive mass transit system, lower costs for higher education, and a state-run healthcare system, which although much maligned in the United States, produces better results in terms of infant mortality and life expectancy than our system currently does (at a much lower cost). 

I’m not saying things are perfect in Canada.  What I am saying is that the escalator experience showed me once again that people in the United States have grown selfish and that it’s killing our society.  We see our roads deteriorating and our public schools choked to death by a lack of funding, and yet we won’t raise taxes.  Large corporations and industry associations that know about the threat of global warming still insist on gutting or stopping environmental regulations.  Physicians refuse to treat Medicare/Medicaid patients.  To sell a few more guns, the industry-fed NRA fights for the right of mentally ill people like the Virginia Tech mass murderer to own and carry firearms.  In Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, where I currently live, very few politicians dare to support reassessment of property taxes, even though that under the current system people in poorer neighborhoods and municipalities pay more than they should in property taxes and people in wealthy areas pay less than they should.

Now some may say that standing right so others can move ahead of you is simply a matter of politeness, but isn’t politeness an aspect of showing concern for others?  Whether it’s not extending unemployment benefits or cutting Social Security benefits so that we don’t have to (god forbid!) raise taxes, what we see is a lack of concern for others.  On an escalator, it’s merely irritating.  In the halls of Congress and our state legislatures, this lack of concern threatens to plunge us into another deep depression and make the Earth unlivable for human beings and other creatures.

The news this morning that U.S. military casualties in Iraq are at their highest since 2008 must have surprised many people who thought the war ended last August.  And those Rip van Winkles among us who just woke up after falling asleep when Bush II stood on an aircraft carrier and declared the war over in 2003 must be completely disoriented.

The death count among our 50,000 troops in Afghanistan in June has been 15 dead, 14 in hostilities.  There has been no report if there have been any deaths among the 100,000 contractors who work for private profit-making companies still performing military services in Iraq.  In the old days, we called them mercenaries.

Last August, President Obama declared that the U.S. combat mission in Iraq would end that month.  But now there’s combat after the end of combat.  Maybe what Obama meant to say was that our forces would cease to attack in Iraq, but only fight back when attacked. 

American presidents have declared the Iraqi War over twice now, once by Obama last August and once by Bush in 2003.  And yet it goes on, as do the wars it has spawned in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Both presidents used overly fine definitions of war’s end to make their case: Obama defined war’s end as the end of a narrow understanding of combat; Bush defined it as the end of major hostilities.  But the combat and the hostilities continue.

These guys went to Harvard and Yale, and at least one was not a legacy (who, as research has shown, receive a much bigger break in getting into colleges than athletes or minorities).  I guess that along the way Bush and Obama never learned that the end of a foreign war either means a country takes all its troops out or that it crushes all but the faintest wisp of an opposition.

Meanwhile, the cost of all these wars has now passed $2.3 trillion, according to a report just released by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.  The Institute estimates that the final cost will be $4.4 trillion by the time we’ve provided care to all the vets whose bodies and minds the war destroyed.  That’s more than $100,000 per U.S. citizen.  That money would go a long way in fixing our roads and bridges, investing in alternative energy and mass transit, educating our youths and helping our aged and poor.  Instead a large part of it is lining the pockets of the owners and operators of the private companies that now perform military tasks that our armed forces once did for themselves.

There was never a reason to be in Iraq and the reason to be in Afghanistan and Pakistan ended when we captured (and then illegally assassinated) Osama bin Laden.  It’s time to start using the standard definition of war’s end and pull all the troops out.  I’m not a military expert, but I don’t see why it has to take more than six months or so to get everyone home.  And by everyone, I mean troops and mercenaries.

Let’s just admit we made a big mistake and leave. 

My first real awareness of Michele Bachmann came about a year ago when she proclaimed from the Conservative media rooftops that 2 million people attended the Glenn Beck march in Washington.  That was 25 times the number that scientific methodologies counted for this much overblown rally.

I thought it amazing that Bachmann could so diffidently throw around what she must have known were false numbers.  The immediate contrast was with Sarah Palin.  Palin seemed to be truly ignorant, whereas Bachmann projected a knowing cunning, as if she knew she was exaggerating far beyond the point of fibbing.

Now Politifact has done one of their truth analyses of Bachmann’s statements.  Politifacts looked into 26 provocative statements Bachmann has recently made, selected at random. 

Politifact likes to rate statements in six descriptive categories, and here’s how Bachmann’s 26 statements fared:

• TRUE:      1
• MOSTLY TRUE: 0
• HALF TRUE: 2
• BARELY TRUE: 5
• FALSE: 11
• PANTS ON FIRE: 7

Basically, Bachmann told the truth once (4%), proffered a semi-truth or a stretcher 7 times (27%) and lied out-and-out 18 times (69%).

Here are a few of Bachmann’s more outrageous lies:

• The President released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve.  President Obama released a mere 4% of the reserve.
• The price of throwing a barbecue on Memorial Day weekend was 29% more this year than last year.  Nationally, the real increase was 3%
• Small businesses with $250,000 in gross sales are looking at a massive tax increase.  The tax increase would be on profit not gross sales, making this one of the smarmiest of the lies.
• The top 1% of wage earners pay about 40% of all taxes to the federal government.  Wrong again, Michele! It’s only about 28%.

And on and on, lie after lie after lie, some almost criminally absurd.

The question is why such a bald-faced liar is getting so much coverage in the media?

What if Bachmann gains a head of steam like Dukakis or Obama did and sweeps through the caucuses and primaries?  Can the Republicans responsibly nominate for either president or vice president someone who continually lies on the factual level?  We’re not talking about the typical conceptual lies and convoluted reasoning about free markets.  Nor are we talking about an abiding faith that distorts the analysis of every phenomenon.  And we’re not talking about pretty euphemisms or false labeling.

No, we’re talking about an extreme pattern of constant lying about facts to make her case.  We’re talking about someone who told the absolute truth 4% of the time.  How can we have a president whom we can’t trust?

Bachmann, Palin and their ilk get popular because the news media give them plenty of opportunities to tell the people what they want to hear.  Like Reagan’s welfare queens, Bachmann’s lies and Palin’s misunderstandings play into the long-standing myths, prejudices and beliefs of a hardcore minority of the country—maybe 20-25% of our citizenry.  The main stream news media  panders to the beliefs of this minority by letting them set the stage for discussions of debt ceilings, education, war, torture, abortion, and virtually every other issue save (at least lately) gay marriage.

But once again, I wonder, have the moneybags and the media mavens thought through the possible outcome of giving their attentions to Michele Bachmann?  Couldn’t they have found another female Conservative horse to ride, perhaps Nikki Haley or Cathy McMorris Rogers?   

Of course, it takes the proffering of lies to argue in favor of many conservative positions, such as loosening environmental regulations or lowering taxes. Bachmann enables the media to avoid doing the lying themselves.  Instead, they can quote Bachmann telling the lies.  The false ideas get out, and yet the media maintains a fiction of journalistic objectivity.  So instead of her habitual lying serving as a barrier to Bachmann leaping onto the national stage, it may be in fact the reason she is able to take the leap.

Is it something in the water?

Or maybe it’s a weird side effect of Fukushima radiation hitting the American shore?

Or maybe it’s because our political and policy-making classes have all been drinking the same free market Kool-Aid? Lapped up, as we know, from the troughs of large multinational corporations, banks and the ultra wealthy.

Whatever, doesn’t it seem as if a lot of so-called experts had a case of the “stupids” this past weekend?  That, at least, is the impression one would get from reading The New York Times.

Here are three stupid ideas proposed by experts in New York Times articles each wrote this past weekend.  All use a convoluted logic that would drive Friar William of Occam to seek a sharp object.

Let’s start with the most grotesque idea, and it comes from Gideon Rose, the editor of the beltway periodical Foreign Affairs.   In his Sunday Times opinion piece, Rose raises the fear that the drawdown of troops that President Obama plans for Afghanistan will lead to a rout.  He never defines what he means by a rout, but it must be something more than the confused fleeing that took place when the U.S. evacuated Saigon in 1975.

And yet, Rose proposes that to exit Afghanistan Obama follow Nixon’s strategy for winding down the Viet Nam War.  Rose speaks of that strategy in a generalized and squeamish manner, describing Nixon and Kissinger as “masking their withdrawal with deliberate deception and aggression.”  He doesn’t define what that phrase means exactly, so I will: What Nixon did was to institute massive bombing of North Viet Nam including civilian zones.  

Rose employs a tautology in his lame attempt to prove that escalating aggression—oh, heck, let’s just call it massive bombing—is the best way to exit Afghanistan: His proof that you should not announce troop withdrawals and that you should escalate aggression is his claim that these are the first two rules of withdrawal.  It’s a classic tautology: A equals B because A equals B.  His other proof is the Viet Nam War’s ending, which most histories portray as lengthy, bloody, shameful and unsatisfactory to American interests. 

Rose’s tautological complexity misses a simple common sense point: No matter what you do, you can’t hide massive troop withdrawals for very long.

FYI: To my mind, the 33,000 soldiers out of a total of 100,000 now stationed in Afghanistan whom President Obama says will be coming home in 15 months is the troop draw-down equivalent of cold molasses.

Let’s turn now to the most deceptive of the “stupidities” advocated this past weekend.  In the business section of the Sunday Times, Robert Frank, a Cornell economic professor, proposes that for the next 18 months we declare a payroll tax holiday for employees and exempt employers from paying payroll taxes for new hires.  Payroll taxes, by the way, are what employers and employees pay to support Social Security and Medicare. He also insists that we don’t lift the cap of $106,800 a year in income, above which people don’t pay Social Security payroll taxes.

The good professor Frank claims that giving these temporary tax breaks will lead to the creation of 6.2 million jobs. 

Now here comes the deceptive part:  How does Frank propose to pay Social Security benefits during the payroll tax holiday (he never mentions Medicare!)? “The Treasury would have to issue new bonds to cover those payments in the short term.”  

In other words, we lower taxes on businesses and borrow money from the wealthy to pay for the tax breaks.  It’s an old game he’s playing: instead of taxing people, and in particular the wealthy, to pay for government services, we fund deficit spending by giving them a safe investment.

Why not just raise taxes and invest the money in job-producing programs such as adding teachers to public schools, rebuilding our infrastructure and supporting commercialization of alternative energy technologies?  The net result will be more permanent job gains and a more equitable distribution of wealth, because government job-creation programs will funnel funds from the wealthy to the middle class and the poor.  As those who have followed OpEdge for any period of time know, the last 30 years have seen the flow of money in the opposite direction, from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Let’s close with the most laughable idea to come out of the weekend, that “Reverse mortgages will help millions of people stay in their homes and pay for a variety of retirement expenses in the coming decades.”  It comes from Ron Lieber, the Saturday Times “Your Money” columnist, whom I have chided before for advocating, albeit sometimes in a subtle way, a “spend first and worry later” mentality in his column.

A reverse mortgage is when the bank pays you from the equity in your house and you don’t have to pay it back until you die (when the heirs pay it back, from your estate, with their own cash or by selling the house).

In his column, Lieber defends reverse mortgages and tries to explain why Bank of America and Wells Fargo won’t write them anymore.  Here’s his reasoning: “Making a mortgage payment is one of the best forms of forced savings we have. So for people who don’t want to sell their homes and downsize to free up money for living expenses (or can’t, for practical reasons), a reverse mortgage may be their best hope for continued solvency.”

Huh, and double huh??!

Lieber’s argument is completely without sense: First of all, making a mortgage payment on a primary residence is a terrible way to enforce savings, because it comes at such a high interest rate.  You make a mortgage because you want to buy a house and it’s very tough to accumulate the cash needed without a loan.  Secondly, even if making a mortgage payment were a good way to enforce savings, that fact would have nothing to do with borrowing equity on your house at high rates to live beyond what Social Security and your retirement savings and pension can afford you.

By the way, Lieber destroys his own case for the reverse mortgage by telling us why the big banks are running from this financial product like rats from a sinking dinghy: They are afraid of bad publicity when they have to foreclose and kick a lot of senior citizens out of their homes because, despite getting the reverse mortgage, they can’t pay their taxes and home insurance.  They’re afraid that like sub-prime loans, the reverse mortgage will lead to another banking fiasco in which millions of people see their lives turned upside down.

Maybe instead of pushing reverse mortgages, Lieber should be giving seniors and those planning to be seniors one day tips about living within their means. 

Among the upper classes in the Germany and Austria of the late 19th and the first few decades of the 20th century, dueling scars, called “Mensur,” were considered a badge of honor, a sign of status.  Fencing was the most popular sport among college students, and the social and economic elite among young men proudly wore scars across their left cheek.  Many seeking to fit in with the upper classes would scar themselves.

In other words, people hurt themselves or welcomed someone else hurting them because they saw it as a sign of status.  As Mel Brooks might put it, “Those crazy Germans!”

I hadn’t thought of the Mensur since my days of studying German literature in graduate school.  But this purposeful scarring came to mind last weekend when I read first online and then in The New York Times about the survey that said that the more debt a young adult had, the more self-esteem they possessed, except among the wealthy. 

The Ohio State researchers looked at both college and credit card debt.  For both kinds of debt, the more that a young person from the lower 25% of family income has of it, the higher the self-esteem.  Only credit card debt raises the self-esteem of those in the middle, and those from the most affluent families get no ego boost from holding either kind of debt.  The effect starts to wane at age 28, by which time people are worried that they may never pay it off.

We can all speculate on why having debt raises self-esteem.  The leader of the team that did the study thinks “young people have come to view debt favorably because they interpret it as an investment in their future.” 

One reason or another, though, the study suggests that debt has become a status symbol.  A status symbol is nothing more than the socialization of self-esteem.  People have high self-esteem because they have attained or embody something that society or a subset of society thinks is of value.

Like a cut on the face, debt is usually harmful, because it results in paying more for something than it is worth and it prevents you from accumulating money for the future, which often necessitates future indebtedness.  Once on the debt merry-go-round, it’s hard to get off.

There are a handful of things for which it is worth going into debt: to fund a business that has a viable business plan; to purchase a house in which you plan to live for a while; and certainly to pay for a college education.

But credit card debt is never a good idea, except for the bankers who collect the interest.  Businesses may like the convenience of credit card payments, but every penny that a customer sends to banks in interest and penalties is a penny not spent on additional goods and services.

The attitude expressed in the survey was not cautiousness about debt, but an embracing of debt as a status symbol.  And like all status symbols in all societies structured into classes, those seeking to attain status put more stock in the symbol than those who already have achieved status.

Something harmful and disfiguring that people embrace as a sign that they’ve made it.  That sounds like both the German dueling scar and debt in contemporary America, especially credit card debt.  Both symbolize a sickness weakening their respective societies.  In Germany and Austria, it was the militarism of the ruling elite that helped cause the slaughter known as World War I.   In 21st century America, it’s the “have it all now” exhortations of advertising, TV, cinema, other mass entertainment and the celebrity, how-to, travel, and lifestyle stories in the news media. 

“Have it now” is part of an unholy trinity of ideological imperatives that are driving us towards environmental, physical and spiritual ruin.  The other two ideas destroying America are: 1) The politics of selfishness, Ronald Reagan’s idea that it is best to seek self interest and never think of the greater good; 2) The idea that buying something is the way to express all emotions, opinions, commemorations, rituals or other inner experiences.