Cutting out Credit Cards: Living Within (or Beneath) our Means
There’s more to buying that high-tech gizmo or fancy new clothes, especially if you put it on plastic. If you’re anything like the so-called average American with combined balances on your credit cards pushing upwards of $10,000 per household, then you’re paying a lot more than the purchase price after factoring in an exorbitant interest rate on the unpaid balance. Just one credit card with a balance of $15,000 and a monthly minimum payment of $300 based on an interest rate of 13 percent would take nearly twenty years to pay off, amounting to nearly $9,000 in interest, according to the website Cardweb.com.
To save or spend?
This raging debate among economic recovery pundits mask the reality that based on our current “free trade” global economic system, what we really mean by spending is consuming. And in this global free trade system, ecological costs are “externalized” if we use the correct economist’s jargon. As a result, we pollute, destroy and exploit where ever we can. If you can’t do this in the United States very easy thanks to national laws and regulations, well then, export your manufacturing and service operations to places that don’t have many, or any, regulations. Then import these products back into the U.S. to sell at a big box store, plopped down where there used to be viable farmland. For example, these BIG companies move operations to places where poor people can sort through toxic junk computers for scrap or to places where throwing something away can’t possibly ruin our own clean air or water in our communities.
According to Emily Kaiser’s analysis for Reuters: “U.S. President Barack Obama needs to convince Americans to spend now and save later in order to get the U.S. economy back on solid footing.” It doesn’t have to be this way.
