I love this. If you give people enough money to get even partway through the pandemic, they
- pay down credit card debt
- put the money in savings
- stop going to their shitty jobs
- generally act like rational economic actors in every way imaginable
...but the Captains of Industry are freaking balls because it turns out the rat doesn't WANT to be in a Skinner box.
I think the Republicans understood this at a reptilian level. They knew, somewhere in their stunted little hindbrains, that if they gave the country a taste of socialism, a taste of dignity, a taste of how the other 10% lives, they'd lose their argument FOREVER leaving them to rely on voter suppression and a cult of personality.
Whelp, one of the causes of the Great Recession that nobody wants to talk about - because, you see, it was entirely caused by those pesky consumers who were buying too much house and being totally irresponsible; it absolutely wasn't about displaced risk and the ability to sell tokens based on risky mortgages for more than tokens based on safe mortgages, get that thought out of your head forever it's heresy - was the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. BAPCA basically fucked... everyone. The idea was, credit card debt had gotten truly insane and people were defaulting all over the place. In order to not end up utterly destitute and completely fucked, they would sometimes turn to bankruptcy. As Elizabeth Warren and others had long pointed out, the average bankruptcy user in the United States is a single mother with medical bills whose spouse is either out of work or dead. But as Chuck Grassley and every other banking shill in the Senate (including Harry Reid, minority leader, also D-NV, home of shitty credit card companies) pointed out, facts don't matter when your lobbyists belong to banks and they want their fucking money. One of the companies that pushed hardest into "you can never declare bankruptcy, we shouldn't be responsible for giving you money you can never pay back at a truly onerous rate, we fucking own you, prole" was Washington Mutual, whose "fuck you we own you since you have a WaMu credit card" division didn't do too much communicating with their "fuck you we own you since you have a WaMu mortgage" division. 'cuz that sweet, sweet minimum payment on a $5k 20% credit card balance? Yeah, you don't want that to go away, for sure. But those mortgage payments? Which are coming in at 2-3-4k a month? And which the other side of which can walk away with a big hit to their credit rating but nothing else because it's a collateralized loan? yeahhhhh turns out you don't want to lose those. So consumers, who ordinarily could have gotten out of debt (painfully) by declaring bankruptcy, experiencing a financial reorganization and going on with their lives, instead discovered that they had a choice between paying their credit cards or paying their mortgage and if they walked the fuck away from the mortgage, the credit card was suddenly more manageable. Thus did Washington Mutual eat shit on its 110th anniversary to the day. It was hardly alone. You may remember certain apocalyptic economic proclamations. If you'd like an unvarnished view inside the shithole that is credit cards, I wholeheartedly recommend this seventeen year old Frontline featuring a very earnest Harvard economics professor named Elizabeth.
Watching it now. Elizabeth Warren is an actually human politician, smart, personable and defends the average consumer. The douche, Andrew Khan, guy that realized folks will bleed more money longer when traditional minimum payments are halved is a soul-less Sith Lord of consumer lending. Thanks for the recommendation.
Yeah she wasn't even a politician then. What I love about Liz Warren is she was an archetypal bootstraps Republican lawyer who dove into bankruptcy law with the common knowledge that everyone declaring bankruptcy was a spendthrift scofflaw abusing the system and once she got into the numbers and discovered that bankruptcies are invariably families whose tragedies cost more than their wages, she basically became a bleeding-heart liberal. The credit card guy they interviewed is like in Witness Protection or some shit. Dude knows he's a walking pariah but clearly, he gets paid enough to put up with it.