Credit Where It's Due

It makes me gag to have to give Sarah Palin credit for something, but in that vice-presidential debate, she made a good point.

It was about living within our means as individuals. It’s easy to blame Wall Street and the predatory lenders. They were offering deals that were too good to be true, and as the old saying goes, they were. But the borrowers have to share some of this blame for taking the bait. Some even lied on their loan applications, though of course, the lenders didn’t fall all over themselves looking for the truth.

There is nothing inherently evil about credit. It’s just a tool like any other. The problem comes when it’s misused. Credit cards are a convenience – they give us the freedom to make decisions out in the marketplace easily and quickly. You don’t have to have a degree in economics to know that when you overextend with credit, you get into trouble.

We’re constantly told these days to conserve, to cut back on our usage of gasoline, electricity, water and the like. How about cutting back on the use of credit? Note that I didn’t say stop, I said cut back. Wouldn’t we be helping the economy, and the health of our financial institutions, if we reduced our credit load? It seems to me that credit is like any other commodity – if we used less of it, the price might go down. But hey, I don’t have a degree in economics, and I’m among the offenders here, to be frank.

When it comes to credit cards, I’ve always found it amusing that when customers miss payments, the card companies jack up the interest rates to 29 percent or so. As if the way to get blood out of a stone is to pound on the stone.

Is it my imagination, or is my postal mailbox only half as full as it used to be? I’m just not seeing those credit card offers that I spend a good part of my time shredding. Maybe we’ll save a few trees. At least there’s room in the mailbox now for all the political junk mail, but fortunately, that will be over soon.

We’re a nation at war. But we’re always at war against something. If it isn’t Iraq, it’s poverty, drugs, teenage pregnancy, you name it. How about a war to save our economy? The last time we were all asked for individual sacrifice to support a common effort was World War II. Americans put up with a lot of drastic regulation in those years, because they knew what the goal was.

Now it’s time to do our bit for the war to save our economy, and whether we like it or not, we’ve all been drafted into this one. If it means keeping the old plastic thing in its holster a little more often, is that too much to ask of ourselves?

There, now I’ve said it.