DebtorsPrison started about two years ago, when we had $23,000 in credit card debt. We still have some debt, around $9,000, your basic average US household credit card debt. Of course, we are luckier than a lot of those average debtors, since ours is locked in at 2% special deal interest rates. Things could be a lot worse.
Of course, DebtorsPrison was never really about the debt per se. This blog was more about the social, political and economic forces that make debt so easy a trap to fall into in the United States. The opening entry of this blog two years ago can still serve for its reintroduction today:
I used to think that responsible behavior like paying your bills on time was the
key to earning good credit. I now realize that what brings you the
whopping high credit limits is irresponsibility, the willingness to surrender
your good judgment to the lure of desire.
I love my credit and am
grateful that it has allowed me to build a happy life for my wife and me, to own
a home, to have traveled to over thirty countries, and to own a hell of a lot of
stuff. Nevertheless, for all the freedom my credit has brought me, the
accumulated debt brings a powerful burden of worry. Even worse, now serves
to constrain my freedom. I have entered a type of debtors’
prison.
This weblog, DebtorsPrison, intends to examine this
peculiar consumer society of ours. Life with easy credit and abundant choice can
be very sweet indeed. And yet we are also living in a kind of madness,
continually tempted and urged to do things which are not necessarily good for
ourselves, for society or for the planet, things we might not have done if we
had the constraints of tight money and fewer choices.
I don’t
intend simply to rant and blame society, corporations, the government or the
media. That would be too easy. It’s true that my politics are
generally left-leaning, pro-conservation, suspicious of big capitalism, and
generally appalled by much of the mindless consumption I see around me.
Nevertheless, it is also true that despite my political beliefs, my good
intentions and my low wages, I too have been lured into the debtors’ prison.
I’m sure there are plenty of out-dated news and broken links in the the old posts and archives, and I’ll be cleaning them out from time to time. A few of my favorite essays from the past will still be linked to in the column on the left. But now it is forward, into the renewed, interest-compounded DebtorsPrison…
