PURITAN NEWS
WEEKLY
3/03/03
THE EVAPORATING AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS
By J. Parnell McCarter
Puritan News Service
Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny [thee], and say, Who [is] the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God [in vain]. - Proverbs 30:8-9
Generally speaking, Protestantism has been held up and sustained by the middle class, in accordance with the truth stated in Proverbs 30:8-9. Not surprisingly, then, Romish-dominated societies are historically characterized by a large poor class, a small upper class, and an even smaller middle class. While America’s heritage is decidedly Protestant, over its history it has become more and more effectively Romish. Due to sinfulness- characterized by profligate spending, gambling, covetousness, and debt load – the U.S. middle class is quickly evaporating. The following article lays out one result:
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Living on Credit
As the Economy Slows and Layoffs Increase, Debt Levels Become a Problem
By Catherine Valenti
Oct. 15 — The economic good times of the last decade have clearly been at an end for some time. But now many consumers are starting to feel the hangover. Not only have consumers been using credit and borrowing at record levels, but delinquent payments and personal bankruptcies are also on the rise. Though the trend of rising consumer debt levels was evident before the devastating attacks of Sept. 11, those events have accelerated the downward spiral that the U.S. economy has been on.
And in this environment of slowing economic activity and steep job losses, experts say Americans' love affair with credit could start coming back to haunt them.
"There are a number of risk factors in terms of the U.S. economy that existed prior to a month ago. One of them was consumer debt," says Daniel Diamond, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business. "Debt per se is not a problem, but debt in relation to income could be."
Debt as a percentage of people's incomes has indeed been rising. In 2000, the average person seeking help from the National Foundation of Credit Counseling, a nonprofit group that provides assistance for people in debt, had a gross average income of $29,738 and a debt load of $26,337 — almost 89 percent of their income. Even more startling is that debt load does not include members' housing loans. In 1995, the average member's debt load was around 71 percent of their income.
Other figures paint a picture of a nation heavily dependent on credit and getting in over its head.
Consumer credit rose by a seasonally adjusted $2.3 billion in August from the previous month, according to the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, some 3.99 percent of credit card payments were past due in the second quarter compared to 2.99 in the previous quarter, while personal bankruptcies for the April to June quarter were up almost 25 percent.
In Deep
Why Americans have been on such a borrowing binge has to do both with the nation's prosperity over the last few years and the easy availability of credit, say industry watchers. The freewheeling attitude of the last economic boom cycle has made many consumers take on an attitude of live now, pay later.
"Most of us are never taught about credit and how to use it," says Joy Thormodsgard, vice president of the National Foundation of Credit Counseling, in Silver Spring, Md. "We are a society that wants immediate gratification. We don't plan ahead we get what we want now and figure out how we're going to pay for it later."
Still more troubling are those consumers that are over-leveraged by taking out home equity loans, says Professor Diamond. These loans, which are based on the amount of equity homeowners have in their property, can be problematic when consumers are losing their jobs because if they can't make payments, they could literally lose the roofs over their heads.
"The equity of the average homeowner has declined significantly in the 1990s," says Diamond. "With second mortgages, third mortgages… it has significantly eroded the equity and therefore increased debt."
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Unscrupulous creditors- like the Rothschild banking family- have been given free reign to lend at usurious rates, and as the economy goes bad it can be expected that they will hold most of the property in the US, as they foreclose on indebted borrowers. And economic power leads to political power:
The rich ruleth
over the poor, and the borrower [is] servant to the lender. - Proverbs 22:7
It is a clever and
subtle way to accelerate the trend towards Romanism.
But ultimately these
unscrupulous parties will not succeed.
The meek shall inherit the earth, not the unscrupulous. Or, as we read in Proverbs:
He that by usury
and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he shall gather it for him that will
pity the poor. - Proverbs
28:8
We can look forward to this after the fall of the Romish Beast.