On Nov 10, 1:02 am, Declan Murphy <declan_mur...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't have any debts anymore, but provided you can a) repay it, and
> b) it helps you purchase something of tangible value to you, there is
> no problem, nor should there be any sense of shame involved.

And this is the main problem we're facing. People use their credit
cards not based on whether or not they can actually pay for the item
they're buying but based on their ability to make the minimum payment.
For some reason people believe that's all they need to do. (At this
point I typically rant on the culture we have of doing 'just enough to
get by'.)

>
> Things probably look quite different when viewed from inside the
> goldfish bowl, but reading the US economy from abroad and from the
> point of view of an outsider, it isn't just the large consumer debt
> and associated low savings, but also public sector debt that is a
> major concern. Interest payments alone now account for 9% of federal
> expenditure, which is equivalent to roughly half of the total defence
> budget, and rising quickly.

True. From what I understand a good deal of this is due to Bush's
policies and the need to fund the war rather than the homefront. A
great story ran on NPR a couple of months back. There is a county in
Texas on the Mexican border, and the highway that runs through that
town is heavily used to traffic drugs. The police department has the
best of everything: Dodge Chargers, better body armor than the
military, etc. The reason is that there is a law that says they get to
keep any confiscated drug money; the drugs, of course, they must
destroy. When the Federal Government cut back on the financing for
local law enforcement the county decided to make use of that law; they
openly admit that they don't stop the drugs going north but instead
stop the money going south. The sherrif said that's about the only way
they can have enough money to operate.


> Without a significant increase in taxation

Whoa, not in this country. We'll cut taxes until it kills us. Which
will probably happen.

> There is a possibility that the
> US will actually make Japan look like a country that has its shit
> together.

I might have said this at some other point, but the US is like that
really talented, really smart, really capable kid that every high
school has, the guy that has so much potential... but doesn't do a
damn thing with it and instead goofs off all day.

John W.