Welcome to the Anti-Debt Agenda
The average American works ten years of their life just to pay interest.
Americans are routinely forced into debt for education and medical care – which are paid for by taxes in many other nations. Credit cards are a very poor substitute for union cards.
Norwegians, Danes, Czechs, Germans, or Swedes do not need to borrow for college – it is free. The Germans and Dutch do not need to borrow for health care – everyone is insured, and deductibles cannot exceed a few hundred dollars.
As Astra Taylor says: “Working people in America are robbed twice. You’re underpaid at the job, and then you’re charged interest because you need student loans to get an education, and then you’re going into debt for medical care, and you may need other loans just to pay rent or put food on the table.”
Student debt, medical debt, and carceral debts (for bail, probation, and court costs) should not exist at all. These debts are the foundation of what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “negative social insurance….. it doesn’t actually make us more secure. It only makes our collective insecurity more profitable.”
Our blog will not focus on consumer debts for homes, new cars or flat-screen TV’s. These debts may just reflect bad personal decisions. The existing bankruptcy laws are probably adequate remedies.
What we will oppose are the debts that arise from the lack of social insurance. The creditors here are clearly not entitled to full repayment with interest. We must expand the category of forgivable debts.
As Robert Meister asks regarding student debt: “Why not raise taxes and provide higher education as a publicly funded good that does not depend upon individual access to private credit markets?
“If you add up the lifetime debt service that former students will pay on $1 trillion, over and above the principal they borrow, you could run a very good public university system for what we are paying capital markets to fund an ever-worsening one.”
This blog will discuss and reprint articles on the size of the problem, along with proposed solutions.
Always feel free to provide comments, criticisms, and suggestions.
Recent Blog Posts
Debt Traps For Employees
In recent years, there has been a widespread imposition of “stay-or-pay” contracts. These agreements force workers to compensate employers if they leave their job before a set time period. The contracts are called “TRAPS” – a Training Repayment Agreement Provision. Employers could legally require workers to pay “liquidated damages” for on-the-job training or use of equipment. Some of the TRAPS demanded unspecified damages for the cost of recruiting a replacement or for the “lost profits” from a worker’s departure. The debt could easily amount to over $10,000. Employers could also demand that departing employees pay them for not providing a…
ANTI DEBT HEROES #5 and #6
Astra Taylor and Hannah Appel Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She often appears on Democracy Now and The Laura Flanders Show. Hannah Appel is co-founder of the Debt Collective and a professor of anthropology at UCLA. She is also a director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Their joint article in the recent Non-Profit Quarterly is entitled “They Need Us More Than We Need Them – The Power of Debtor Organizing.” They argue as follows: Starting in the 1970s, the United States moved from a tax-funded welfare state (albeit one that primarily benefited white men…
GoFundMe Is Not A Solution For Healthcare
Charity is a good thing, and there will always be a role for it. However — voluntary donations cannot make up for our stingy healthcare system. When GoFundMe contributions provide care for a sick child, that does not excuse our country’s lack of national health insurance or paid sick leave. GoFundMe is currently bragging that it has raised over $30 billion — over its entire existence, for all kinds of needs… To which I answer….Big deal! This is less than 10% of our annual national out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. It is, at best, putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. Besides…
The CFPB And Consumer Debt
The idea for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) originated in a paper that Elizabeth Warren wrote in 2007 while she was a law professor at Harvard. She moved to Washington after Dodd-Frank passed, to help then-President Obama get CFPB up and running. She touted it as a tool to protect average people from banks behaving badly. Obama considered naming Warren to direct the agency, but it became clear that corporate players and Republicans on the Hill wouldn’t have it. They feared she’d be too zealous a leader. Since 2010, the CFPB’s work has included: The CFPB has had a tangible impact on…
Bankruptcy Can Be Profitable… For Corporations
For an individual or small business, the entire process of bankruptcy can be pretty horrific. You must deal with the shame, the harassing letters and phone calls, and the final court proceedings. This is clearly not true for certain investors and for large corporations… 1) They can use bankruptcy to escape lawsuits Bankruptcy has become a powerful weapon in the arsenal of corporate defendants. Bankruptcy offers companies facing legal liability an escape hatch that puts them beyond the reach of lawsuits. Bankruptcy can let companies emerge from their own scandalous misconduct unscathed. Bankruptcy was never intended to protect bad actors…
Public Prosecutors Meet Heavy Resistance
Liberals often claim that the cure for crime is to expand social-welfare programs. They say we must first address economic exploitation, male and white supremacy, and homophobia in order to reduce violent crime. Other culprits for ‘mass incarceration’ include a biased legal system, early childhood mistreatment, and draconian drug enforcement. However — in the 1960’s, Chinese immigrants had the lowest average incomes in California…about $4,000 a year. At that time, the total number of Chinese in state prisons was five. No one proposed that we “ramp up social spending”, or “provide affordable housing” to the Chinese, in effect to keep…
Vulture Funds Are A Disgrace
Debt vultures are nothing new in America – especially in health care. Collection firms can buy medical debts for pennies on the dollar, and then they try aggressively to collect the full amount. However, this ugly business model also operates on an international scale. I refer to the ‘Vulture funds’ — who have spent decades honing a predatory playbook, designed to extract maximum profits out of struggling, debt-ridden countries. The vulture funds business model is based on…. Billionaire Paul Singer – a longtime patron of Supreme Court judge Samuel Alito — has made exorbitant profits this way. Singer was the…
My Favorite Podcasts and Blogs
Podcasts: Arm and a Leg – Practical presentations on how to fight a hospital bill, how to deal with your insurance company, and other ways to fight the high cost of health care. Behind the Bastards – Colorful oral histories of history’s villains, ranging from Caligua to Hitler, Stalin’s Beria, the founder of Scientology, Idi Amin, and many others. This show resembles the excellent historical podcast Slow Burn, but it’s free. Best of the Left – each show is a melange of interviews, speeches, and articles read aloud, all on left-wing themes. The Bulwark – weekly interviews with never-Trumpers. The…
Medicare Is Not Going Broke
To appreciate this statement, one must first wade through the complexity of Medicare accounting. Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) is funded with a tax of 2.90% total on all payroll income, plus an extra .90% on income that exceeds $250,000. For the first thirty years of Medicare, the annual receipts from payroll taxes exceeded the benefits paid out. The government created a paper “trust fund” with these surpluses. This was good publicity for the stability of Medicare Part A. The surpluses were invested in Treasury bonds. The Medicare trust fund thus holds a combination of current receipts and previously purchased…
Expose The Vicious Settlement Buyers
A little-known area of financial abuse involves “structured settlement” annuities. A structured settlement is often used in compensation for injuries or accidents – i.e. car crashes, medical malpractice, and class-action lawsuits. The victim is set up to receive their money through periodic payments –this is the ‘structure’. For example, the recipient might get $2,000 a month to age 65, and $1,000 a month thereafter. There is not a lump sum cash advance –which is a good thing. There are many stories of lump sums being dissipated all too fast, with huge resulting debts. Most attorneys and judges advocate for structured…
Update On Student Loan Forgiveness in 2024
Student loan forgiveness can be quite confusing. Here is a brief overview: Back in 2020, the Biden administration announced a plan to forgive $10,000 per debtor, for virtually the entire student debtor population – about 44 million borrowers. (The amount would be $20,000 if a student had been poor enough originally to also receive a Pell Grant.) A married couple with student debts could be earning $250,000 a year today – but they would still have received $10,000 apiece in loan forgiveness. This might harvest votes in wealthy suburbs, but it seemed excessive to Republican opponents. This plan relied on…
Anti-Debt Agenda Heroes #4 – Karl Denninger
Karl Denninger has maintained a lively blog called Market Ticker. He is a tech-industry entrepreneur who writes bluntly about politics, technology, and individual rights. If you combined Bernie Sanders with Rush Limbaugh, you might have Karl Denninger. He often speaks about health care…..and on the Market Ticker post of 3-30-2017, he proposed a series of laws to “clean up” the health sector. These still sound good today! Here are the regulations he would propose: 1. All providers must post, in their offices and on a public website, a full and complete price list which shall apply to every patient. 2. For a bill…
Child Support Can Be A Serious Debt Problem
Readers may remember the controversial 2015 shooting of Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man, in South Carolina. A policeman was convicted for murder in the case, after a video surfaced showing him shooting Scott from behind. But few people ask: “Why was Walter Scott running away?” The sad explanation: child support. Scott had been repeatedly sent to jail for failure to pay child support. By the time of his death, he owed $18,000, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. He had ended up in a vicious cycle: he couldn’t pay child support because he couldn’t hold a job,…
Beware Of Student Debt Scams
2023 was overall a good year for student debtors, even with some legislative reversals. However, borrowers are still receiving phone calls, emails, letters, and/or texts offering them relief from their federal student loans, or warning them that student loan forgiveness programs would end soon. Usually, the so-called student loan debt relief companies offering these types of services don’t offer any relief at all. Often they’re just fraudsters who are after your money. Here are some examples of the false claims made in these communications: Communications using this type of aggressive advertising to lure borrowers are NOT coming from the U.S. Department of…
Can We Ever Solve Medical Debt?
If you are concerned about medical debt, you have to start with the hospitals. Of the six million Americans who owe more than $5,000 in medical debt, 72 percent attribute their debt to bills from acute care, such as a single hospital stay or treatment for an accident. There is a movement to limit medical debt…..but it is inconsistent across the states. That’s no surprise. The American hospital system has always been an unwieldy combination of private funding, public funding, federal and state regulations, and charity. Medical debt is not inevitable, however. We Americans are too cheap to establish straightforward…
An Epidemic Of Insurance Claim Denials
A Kaiser Foundation survey on 9-29-23 makes it clear– we are seeing a large increase in insurance claim denials. When insurance companies deny claims, patients eventually pay the price. These bills can easily turn into medical debt, with troubling consequences; people take steps that put their health at further risk. 1 in 7 people with medical debt have even been denied medical care because of their debt. The insurance companies themselves admit that 41 million in-network claims were declined during the 2021 plan year. Among the for-profit insurers who sell on Healthcare.gov, 17% of patient’s claims were denied. According to Kaiser,…
Free Legal Aid For Bankruptcy Filers
A non-profit firm called Upsolve enables many bankruptcy filers to pay nothing in legal fees. Here’s the background: Chapter 7 bankruptcy attorneys usually require their clients to pay in full before filing the case. You cannot blame them…if a lawyer does not collect their fees up front, their bill could later be discharged along with the rest of the client’s debts. This creates a big barrier for low-asset, low-income bankruptcy filers. They must come up with $2000 or more in cash before filing Chapter 7. But now there is good news. Upsolve was born in 2018 with seed funding from…
“Creeping Socialism” Would Be Good For America
Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Joe McCarthy-style conservatives constantly complain that “Democrats would impose European-Style Socialism on America.” And how bad would that be? Will Americans be hopelessly corrupted by national health insurance, mandatory vacations, paid maternity leave, rent subsidies, or larger child allowances? After all, Australia hasn’t been destroyed yet – despite having gun control, a national health system, a substantial minimum wage, 4 weeks mandatory vacations and 2 weeks guaranteed sick leave. Actually, millions of older Americans already have socialism, and they love it. They strongly approve of Social Security, Medicare, and military pensions. They aren’t really opposed…
Challenge Medical Bills in Small Claims Court
Small claims courts have been a fixture throughout America for over seventy years. In the state of New York, for example, there are Small Claims Courts in each of the 62 counties — including at least one in each of the five boroughs of New York City. Most other states have similar coverage. In small claims court, there is usually a single judge with no jury and no witnesses. The courts are typically informal – designed to make the legal process accessible and affordable. The judge usually asks the plaintiff and the defendant to simply “Tell us your story in…
Medical Credit Cards: Pro or Con?
The most frequent settings for medical credit cards have been dentist’s offices, cosmetic surgery, veterinarians, hearing services, vision services and primary care. However, the cards are increasingly offered to cover surgeries and emergency services provided at hospitals and doctors’ offices. (Some of the newer lenders are owned by private equity, which to me is automatically a call for concern.) The business appeal of these cards is that providers don’t have to be in the financing or debt collection business. They receive full payment quickly. Some products advertise to providers that they’ll be paid in two business days, while others advertise…