Your Extra Credit Assignment

I know, I know, some of my valued readers out there have been wondering, where has Ryan gone? It's been two long weeks, and there has been no sign of him around here! Fear not, for I have been well. Or at least, I have been. I did, in fact, write a blog earlier this week, as a guest spot for my friend Laura. If you wish to read my guest entry (and you should), you can find it at:

ls250802.blogspot.com

At any rate, your beloved Excellence of Eloquence has returned home to his own blog, and I have a new and exciting topic for the day! For several years now, I've had people react with surprise when they discover that I do not have a credit card. I know, I know, I'm an adult now, isn't it about time I got one? No, it goddamn well is not time that I got a credit card! The credit card industry is a fucking scam, but somehow this fact seemed to elude the rest of the populace of this country until, what, a couple weeks ago? Now suddenly, everybody is all up in arms about what I could see, plain as day, from the start. Suddenly, we're getting some restrictions passed, some laws about what credit card companies can and can't do (though these aren't actually going to change anything, it's still a scam, now it's just in plain English so that people can't complain when they get gouged). Not that I'm entirely taking the side of the American public in this debacle. So many allegedly responsible people with credit cards still spend against it even though they know it's a bad idea, because they know it's going to take longer than their natural life to pay the thing off, but they still do it, either because they have no money anywhere else to buy the things they actually need, or they are stupid and buy the things they want and then act surprised when they have to suffer the consequences of those actions! Either way, it's bad, and it's a scam.

Unfortunately, so many people are stuck in a rut of owing on their credit card because they don't actually make enough money to live off of, because this country is so fucking hostile to its own working class. Anybody know why that is? Anybody? Oh, wait, I know. It's probably because the credit card companies, like every other large company in this country, essentially owns our legislators, so they can pressure those lawmakers to not do their job and make laws preventing those companies from fucking over...well, everyone. So, they get to continue charging outlandish interest rates, and on top of that, they're allowed to do dick-ish things like raising those rates without warning and for no good reason. It creates an enormous mountain of debt that virtually nobody can ever hope to pay off, because it's more than they can expect to earn in a lifetime. But the credit card companies know that's what will happen, and it's what they want, because you're still paying them for life, and even if they don't get anywhere near the whole amount, they'll still get a hell of a lot more back than you originally spent.

So, I don't get a credit card, because I at least know myself well enough to know that I would be too tempted to use it, and I don't want to be paying it off for the rest of my life. I make very little money as it is, I see no sense in throwing any of it away.