- I drive a paid for seven-year-old CRV with 120,000 miles. My wife drives a paid for nine-year-old Minivan with 95,000 miles. I have never been a car person. My Dad always bought used cars. I don't see the point in spending money on a depreciating asset. My self esteem is not tied to the car I drive. I've owned two new cars in the 30 years I've been driving. I've financed my cars over four years. Every month that I don't have to make a car payment allows me to put that money towards my kid's college fund or my retirement account. GMAC, Chrysler Financial, and Ford Credit have been the credit drug pushers that have permitted luxury addicts all over the country to tool around in a Mercedes, BMW, or Porsche of their choice. Shockingly, lending money to subprime borrowers led to billions in losses. GMAC rationally decided in October 2008 to limit loans to people with credit scores above 700. In December the government delivered $5 billion of taxpayer TARP funds to GMAC, who then decided to again lend money to subprime borrowers with 620 credit scores. Their plan is to lose money on these loans, but make it up on volume. When you see an 18-year-old punk driving a BMW, you are probably making his car payment.
- We use a credit card to pay for virtually all of our monthly expenses. 1% of the charges go into my son's 529 college account. I have not paid an interest charge since 1990. I'm a credit card company's worst customer. No interest income, no late charges and I've received maximum rewards. I'm not the average American. The average American owes $9,000 on their credit cards. In a fair world, when these people couldn't repay their debts the bank would take a major loss and the consumer face bankruptcy with the inability to borrow for years. The top credit card issuers JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Capital One issued credit cards to anyone with a pulse because they just sold the package of bad debt to widows and the Chinese. Then they drank their own poisoned Kool-Aid. Now our clueless Treasury Secretaries (Mr. Paulson & Mr. Geithner) have shoveled $78 billion of your tax dollars to these banks so they can continue to send out 5 billion credit card solicitations per year to more deadbeats. Loaning money to people incapable of repaying you is generally not a good business practice, except in the America of today.
- Individuals in the United States have the right to live any way they choose. Many have chosen to borrow and live the good life today and not worry about tomorrow. They will vote for the politician that promises them bread and circuses without requiring them to sacrifice, save for a rainy day, take responsibility for their future or exercise any self control. This is where reality and fantasy meet. People can only borrow and spend if the Federal Reserve and bankers provide the funds to do so. By creating money out of thin air and handing it out to people with no legitimate means of repaying, the bankers who run this country have put this country on the road to ruin. The government solution is to confiscate your tax dollars, give it out to bankers, who will lend it to new subprime borrowers, who will not repay these debts. They are doing this in a last ditch attempt to retain power and control.
The people of our great country must heed the words of David Walker, unless we want it to collapse into a heap of smoldering ashes.
"The US government is on a 'burning platform' of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon. There are striking similarities between America's current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."
Let's see how far we've come. I guess we're going to find out.
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