$18,400,000,000,000

 $18,400,000,000,000

This is the number that an article this past week used to describe the household debt in the United States.  Presuming that it could be off a dollar or two, it remains a rather significant number.  Our household debt has reached trillions, not millions, not billions.  So what you say is the significance of that?

This is a significant number; it has meaning.  We are a society that operates on debt.  Corporate America a long time ago learned that it can sell only so much stuff if people spend only what they have; hence it has created a method by which people can buy stuff without the money to buy it, with only the promise to pay over time. 

The method corporate America developed was to create companies that provide the money to buy stuff you can't afford to buy outright.  This too is a profit making enterprise - - the profit is called interest which in turn becomes investment income and this generation of money without production has created a whole new field of study - - "finance capitalism".  

In order to buy something without the money to do so, one eventually must pay additional money for the same product which often, as one can quickly realize, may double the amount of the cost of the product purchased.  A whole lot of money is going to companies that don't produce anything.  They are siphoning off billions of dollars from our national income by creating a way to allow us to have stuff we can't afford and probably don't need and to go into debt, and for many of us, for the remainder of our lives.

The organizations that provide the money to buy stuff do not produce anything of value.  They don't make shovels or stoves, they simply are formed for the purpose of providing a way for you to buy more stuff.  This has become necessary for the reason that millions of people are involved in making the stuff that you can not afford to buy, and without debt most of the stuff made would not be sold and the people who make the stuff would not have a job or an income and would be unable to buy the stuff they make or other stuff made by other people.  Money would, in effect, disappear.  

The question becomes:  Can we as a country or a society survive without debt?  Is it required that you and I buy stuff we can't afford for our country to remain intact and what we think of as being prosperous?  Is buying stuff we can't afford a necessary element of living in a modern society, ours in particular?  Are we really prosperous if we owe a lot of money and have to spend our days making money to pay for all the stuff that we have the use of?

The answer, of course, is yes; it is necessary.  We are judged by what we have; this is a requirement and one that is made clear to us continually.  We are not only judged by what we own, but what we have the use of.  We have the use of the car we don't own.  The car can be repo'ed.  We don't own the car until we don't owe money for it and by that time it will have little value.  We don't own the house we live in: it can be taken from us by the company that loaned us the money to buy it.  Not everyone is in debt, very true!  But if we owe, in total, $18,400,000,000,000, someone surely is.

The debt we have personally and collectively is significant; it defines us; it determines our lives; it makes us who we are. The church, the government, the organizations we belong to do not control our lives, our debt does. 

Richard E H Phelps II

Mingo