Meteorblades posted this article on the economy in which someone asked "What would the economic abyss be?"
I responded with this:
You have to break a few eggs
to make an omelet.
I don't know what the abyss would be, but i worry that we've lost our chance for the great upheaval that we need because we avoided soul-searching by propping up a fundamentally flawed system. I see Banks made 38 billion in overdraft fees. A fine that should be a slap on the wrist to promote good personal accounting has become an industry itself that would be too big to fail. If someone tried to reform this tiny little ridiculousness it would take months or years to wend its way legislatively through the lobbyist gauntlet, ending in a watered down piece of loophole crap. i sometimes think we needed to go off the cliff.
I was encouraged (if for no other reason than to not be so wordy in the comments) to make a diary out of the banking story. instead i give you this.
I knew a girl, a decent, considerate and hardworking girl. Everyday she went to work in the morning, driving her jalopy downtown to serve coffee to the elites of our town. In order to be downtown, serving coffee for $5 an hour plus (coffee shop) tips, she had to park her car. She'd try to find a meter near the shop she worked at for obvious (to anyone who knows metered parking) reasons: she had to feed that beast every two hours or she'd get a $75 dollar ticket. Of course, a rush at a bad time, a not so ideal parking location and a tyrannical boss, not to mention the err of all things human, she racked up a lot of $75 dollar tickets (those meter maids are good at their job - the job being to pad the city's coffers with funds from careless parkers). A lot of those $75 dollar tickets turned into $150 dollar tickets, automatically, if they weren't paid in full within 8 days.
Without going into the math of what just a few parking tickets can do to an income derived from $5 dollars an hour (minus all the quarters that didn't get deducted from the fines), i'll just jump ahead to the conversation i had with a judge, on her behalf, about trying to mitigate the $3000 plus dollars she owed the city.
"Judge", i said, "She's just a hardworking girl, caught in a bad situation. Somebody's gotta serve that coffee to all you movers and shakers, and well she puts those quarters in that machine like she's feeding her child but still sometimes she gets caught in a twist and that meter maid doesn't just fine her another quarter?
"Why don't you just park in the monthly lot?" said the judge. "it's only $125 bucks for a whole month!"
"That sounds like i great idea," I said. "We'll get right on that. Of course $125 bucks is no small thing, so we'll have to sort out her budget a bit, but yes, you make a great point. Now I don't want to get into the math here with your Honor, but perhaps you could find in yourself a little consideration for what a $3000 bill means to a young girl who works at a coffee shop for $5 an hour."
"I'll tell you what" said the judge, "I'll knock $125 off, to get her started on the new parking space."
Anyway, they impounded her car, she had to quit the coffee shop. Now she's a stripper making $300 bucks a night. She's got a new car and she parks wherever she damn well pleases.
The point is live and learn is bullshit. there is a $50 billion dollar industry built on ripping people off for overdrafting their bank accounts. Is it a slap on the wrist intended to encourage disciplined personal accounting? No, it's a fucking too-big-to-fail racket that would be ill served by doing the right thing. I know what that Judge was thinking. He was realizing he can't start a bad habit of acting reasonable when the very gouging of those most incapable of paying was his source of income.
I don't believe we're ever gonna get right.