Designed to grow debt

Alexandra Erin tweeted a thread:

Something we really don't talk about nearly enough in this country is how much the economy *depends* on people being in debt, how much corporate profiteering is driven by consumer debt and student debt.

People love to throw around the term "moral hazard" when we talk about debt relief. Moral hazard is basically the danger that people will take advantage if we make it clear their actions will have no consequences. The term is basically only invoked these days to cover the "moral hazard" of individual people who go into debt and then get bailed out, but as a concept it covers (and in fact fits better) what happens when we *allow* lenders to create those conditions in the first place.
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We have built our economy around debt, and we are not going to change that by attacking individual people's financial choices. The system is designed to encourage debt, lock in debt, grow debt. One person's debt is literally another person's investment. And there comes a point (a point I'd argue we're far past) where we have to say to the people who have been extending the credit: well, what did you expect? They have made unwise investments! We can bail them out... by paying off the debt... but that's it. We're closing the shop.

We can reconfigure consumer credit into something that is useful but not usurious, something sustainable, but we can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them.

Eric Rowe replied:

When I last visited America I was just driving down the street in Fresno and it was obvious that the major industry in town was 'poverty'. Everything was built around maintaining and providing for it. Fast food, government support services, charities, and homeless people everywhere. The vast majority of stores dollar shops selling junk that caters to a marketing driven need for stuff that won't pull them up the ladder, but instead limit their opportunities.

Max Kennerly describes himself as a trial lawyer by day and cookie monster by night. In a Twitter thread he notes the differences in penalties between white collar crime and the crimes that working people commit. He quotes a tweet from Sarah Kendzior:

The GOP has been hijacked by a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. This is not a secret.

Then Kennerly replies:

Thus, this hijacking was made possible in part because the GOP, Wall Street, and corporate America spent years creating a Swiss-cheese legal framework in which even trivial amounts of complexity or deniability renders political corruption lawful.