Please Make Us into Credit Card Junkies!
No one in our society is addressing the root cause of our financial woes. Simply put, we as a nation have forgotten how to live within our means. We look at our government running big deficits and carrying HUGE loans and we think it must be somehow good. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander!
The credit card companies bombard us with ads and messages that it is ok to fall behind on your bills. Just take a loan and we will even make it easy; just write this check we are sending and all your bill woes are gone. What they don't tell you is that the bills may be gone today, but in the long run you are going to pay through your nose; 20% interest rate plus various types of advance fee, check fees etc. After it is said and done, you would have been better off paying the original bill yourself.
But the problem is even more fundamentally wrong in our mindset. Since when has it become ok to live beyond your means? Why are our politicians, academicians, preachers, society leaders sounding an alarm bell that if we continue to borrow at the rate we are doing, if we continue to live beyond our means; a day will come very soon that we will go bankrupt as a nation?
Why is our mindset that credit card is almost a birth right? As if it is written in our constitution that 'thy shall have credit cards and spend, spend, spend".
To make matters worse we are spreading the same doctrine all over the world. We have become credit junkies and now we want the rest of the world to become credit junkies. As if somehow the sin of excess spending somehow becomes a virtue if everyone in the world is doing it.
What we are doing is hurting our image by exporting our bad habits abroad. We are already seen as 'ugly Americans'. After the Iraq war fiasco we have lost even more respect. Now to have our American credit card companies touting credit cards and loans all over the world to make other populations into credit junkies makes us look very sleazy. Instead, what we should do is say to the rest of the world, don't do the mistake we did. Don't fall for loans and become credit junkies.
Credit cards are good ONLY if they are used within our means. Loans are good if they make us more money than the interest we pay. It almost seems like we should have a class before a person is given a credit card. Truly, the population needs to be educated. This is the best legacy we can give to the world.
Published by Bob Young
Bob Young writes for Lookupcreditcards.com. Media people can contact him when you need a source for credit card issues. He can be reached at administrator at Lookupcreditcards.com View profile
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2 Comments
Post a CommentDianna..I did not mean the Chinese example as the end game. I meant it more as an example of how the credit card companies are placing our mindset into numbness. As if the cure to our over spending habit is just get 'more debt'.
Somebody needs to give the masses a wake up call and educate them to prevent them form self destruction. Credit card companies are absolutely in it for profit, but by their over marketing of loans they are killing the 'goose that lays the golden egg'.
I liked the points you made, especially the historical point about the Chinese and the opium trade. However, I don't know if it follows that the ultimate end motives of the credit card companies are for a docile, controlled population. I think they just want to make money. I've always thought that credit card abuse is historically closer to the indentured servitude that lower-class English people would enter into to get to America. They would sell themselves into slavery for several years in order to get to a free land...a terribly ironic act. Credit card debt is nothing more or less than economic slavery. Good article.