Matt Taibbi: From an Unlikely Source, a Serious Challenge to Wall Street

[truedelphi]

63. Very interesting comments to ponder.

I too think to many people look on debt as "inevitable."

But the thinking on debt has undergone major changes in just sixty years. My dad never made more than 20K a year in his life.

Yet he paid cash for his cars. Always brand new. We took vacation, we had a doctor that made house calls (For $ 5)

But as time went on, life became inflated. When I bought a new car in 1992, I bought it on credit. (Although I put forty percent down.) I remember confessing to my accountant circa 1995 that I felt bad because I owed 15 % of my yearly salary to outside interests. He was amazed. "Most people in Marin County now owe 30 percent of their annual salary, and that is before you consider real estate or housing costs."

Suddenly I understood why so many others I knew could afford the fancy "casual" dresses and expensive shoes, and the yearly cruise trips, even though they didn't make more money than I did. Around that same time, there were ads on TV to the effect that it is normal to put the cost of your groceries on the credit card.

And as far as the Elite were concerned: by letting us all have the "privilege" of acting like we are rich, they must have figured out that our possessions offered us distractions, and we could be counted on to overlook such mundane matters as how the tax code is ripping us off.