Ben Franklin on Wealth: Then and Now

There'll always be booms that are followed be recessions in this country.

We always get excited and blow our wad, then can't figure out how to pay for groceries.

That's the way we are,

I ditched my credit card in August. It expired and I never activated the new one. It has forced me to be better at budgeting. But we get by fine. I am quite happy living a credit card-free life.

I very much agree with Ben Franklin that debt makes you a poor citizen, but he also believed that education was a key to good citizenry. Unfortunately, the cost of higher education in this country has created an environment where it is not unusual for students to graduate with $30,000 - $70,000 of debt. This has led to young people being preconditioned to incur debt.

I've never had credit card debt.

I have what passes for a credit card, but it is only a debit card.

That was a great show! The callers: Gene, Ahmed, and the fellow between
them whose name I don't remember... they were fabulous!

Here's a question I have. It sounds like Michael Mandel is almost
certain that humans are headed for a cataclysm. To be honest, when
you look at the world around you, it's easy to see all the evidence
supporting this belief: the federal reserve ends up with negative
non-borrowed holdings for the first time in its history; oil is
peaking; the global climate is changing; nuclear proliferation shows
all signs of continuing... The list goes on. Yet our species has
weathered its honkpiles of cataclysms by now. We survived the
plague. It doesn't seem completely improbable that at some point we
survived a period of intense rain and rising water. Hell, go back far
enough and we survived a giant meteor crashing into Earth and
wiping out nearly all life. As recently as the '70s, we were all
supposed to die in a new ice age...

Do you think there's any value in setting up a concern whose ultimate
functional contribution would be to study the probable very-long-term
outcomes of the present situation and to advise world leaders as to
the best course of events -- or even to directly affect the course of
events -- to steer us, as a species, past the next bottleneck as effectively as possible?

There would be many corollary fields of research. Is the next
bottleneck knowable? If we saw it would we know it? Can we predict it?
Do past bottlenecks serve as an indicator of future ones? What are the
best financial instruments and incentive structures to make it pay to
engage in bottleneck-averting behavior? Is there any possible way
politicians, corporations, the courts, and public opinion could accept
them without too much complaining?

What would such a company's exit be? Where and at what time does the
money go in and out of such a concern?

What would its main fields of research be?

What would an employee's day-to-day be like?

There's nothing inherently wrong with debt, credit card debt or otherwise. Capitalism couldn't exist without debt. The truth is, a great many people are weak, stupid, or both.

If you make bad decisions, you should pay the consequences, rather than having the federal government bail you out of a "subprime mortgage."

Ditto for credit cards. If you make 42K a year, as the average American does, then you have no business putting 10-20-30K on credit cards. But that doesn't stop the weak and stupid from doing so.

Try putting the blame where it belongs.

Ben Franklin said the same thing, Jack. I won't be giving up my credit cards because they are great if you manage them right.