HAHA - what's in your wallet?
dailysouthtown.com
Actually, the most entertaining thing on the tube right now is still a LendingTree.com ad. It never fails to make me (and anyone who's seen it) laugh.
It's the one with the well-to-do suburban homeowner who drones on about his new boat, expensive SUV, big home and country club membership. He then asks, "How can I afford all this? I'm in debt up to my eyeballs. (Pause) "I can't even make my finance charges. Somebody, please help me."
It's drama, comedy and reality all in one.
news.enquirer.com
Savings plummet as U.S. borrows
Experts warn bubble burst could ruin us
By Robert Tanner
The Associated Press
You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day.
That's how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor.
And it's not even taking into account credit card bills, mortgages - all the debt we've racked up personally. Savings? The average American puts away barely $1 of every $100 earned.
Our profligate ways at home are mirrored in Washington and in the global marketplace, where as a society America spends $1.9 billion more a day on imported clothes and cars and gadgets than the entire rest of the world spends on its goods and services.
A new Associated Press/Ipsos poll finds that barely a third of Americans would cut spending to reduce the federal deficit and even fewer would raise taxes.
A chorus of economists, government officials and elected leaders both conservative and liberal is warning that America's nonstop borrowing has put the nation on the road to a major fiscal disaster - one that could unleash plummeting home values, rocketing interest rates, lost jobs, stagnating wages and threats to government services ranging from health care to law enforcement.
David Walker, who audits the federal government's books as the U.S. comptroller general, put it starkly in an interview with the AP:
"I believe the country faces a critical crossroad and that the decisions that are made - or not made - within the next 10 years or so will have a profound effect on the future of our country, our children and our grandchildren. The problem gets bigger every day, and the tidal wave gets closer every day."
More than two centuries ago, Benjamin Franklin warned: "He that goes aborrowing, goes asorrowing." Now, a laugh-till-you-cry commercial portrays a man with a beautiful home and car declaring: "I'm in debt up to my eyeballs. I can barely pay my finance charges. Somebody help me."
Americans used to save, but no longer. Back in the 1950s, a generation of Americans who had survived the Depression and Second World War saved roughly 8 percent of their income. The savings rate rose and fell slightly over the decades - it went as high as 11 percent and as low as 7 percent during the "greed is good" 1980s - but now those days are only a memory.
In the charge-everything start of the new millennium, savings have plummeted: to just 1.3 percent last year, nearly to zero in the last few months and even to negative numbers in the latest estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The lack of savings is mirrored by a rise in debt. In 2000, household debt broke 18 percent of disposable income for the first time in 20 years, meaning debt eats almost $1 in every $5 American families have to spend after they get past the bills that keep them fed and housed. |
