Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Financial Advice from the Doggie Bag

One of my favorite fanatically conservative blogs is Where's Your Brain?. It's filled with rants against anyone who doesn't agree 100% with the blog's creator. Reading that blog generally leads any cogent person to ask, Where's Your Heart?

But, over the past 2 days, the annonymous author (who only identifies herself as JustaDog) has shown she does have a heart, albiet an extremely small one. She has chosen to offer her sage financial advice to help those buried under credit card debt.

Here's her formula:
  1. Run up a credit card debt (not including a mortgage or car purchase) of about $80,000.
  2. Locate a friend who will give you a job that pays $10,000 net per month.
  3. Work at the job for 6 months and use your $60,000 in net wages to reduce your credit card debt by 75%.
  4. Quit the job and use money from somewhere else (?) to pay off the balance.
Gosh! It sounds so darn easy. Before we know it, Justadog will be running fabulous infomercials on late night TV.

What Justadog has unwittingly admitted to is the formula that has made many a transnational corporation rich -- a subsidy. While she had the financial freedom to throw her wages into her egregious debt, SOMEBODY else was paying for all the necessities of life. Yes, either a spouse, partner, parent, child or rich pal was covering her rent/mortgage, utilities, food, insurance, clothing, travel (she's said on her blog that she loves to travel) and medical expenses.

Unfortunately, most consumers don't have this kind of luxury. Most consumers in debt must not only pay off said debt BUT also concurrently pay for the necessities of life. This is why it's difficult for people in the working and middle classes -- obviously Justadog is in neither of these classes -- to dig out from under debt.

This situation offers a quintessential example of how a rich person fails to understand the obvious head start they enjoy over the average person. Those who lick the silver spoon fail to comprehend what it's like for those without eating untensils. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, it's hard to pull one's self up by the bootstraps if said person has no boots.

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