Broke: Why is a nation that considers spending a civic duty approving harsher ways to punish the bankrupt?
/- Originally published by the New York Times Magazine on March 27, 2005 [more]
By WALTER KIRN
In the mid-1970's, around the time the parents of several school friends began going broke and losing their small farms because of high interest rates and falling crop prices, an envelope bearing an unfamiliar logo appeared in our mailbox. I carried it to the house and set it on the kitchen counter next to the radio my mother was listening to as she fried liver and onions on her old stove. She opened the envelope with a paring knife and drew out the thin, rectangular hard object I had been fingering through the paper. I remember the odd expression on her face -- a mixture of optimism and apprehension -- as she held the novelty out to me and said, ''It's a BankAmericard.'' About a week later the kitchen radio was replaced by a portable TV set. By the next summer, when the banks started foreclosing on our neighbors' farms, my mother's old stove had been replaced as well, a microwave oven stood beside it and the BankAmericards in my parents' wallets had been joined by American Express cards.
Every line of credit tells a story. Over the last few decades, as average Americans have taken on vastly higher levels of personal debt using an ever-increasing variety of financial instruments, the number and complexity of these stories have multiplied exponentially. The interactions of these millions of stories (does one family's updated kitchen, for example, relate in some way to the failing farm next door?) may be too difficult to comprehend, even for experts armed with supercomputers. What we all understand, however, is that these stories have only two fundamental endings.
The unhappy ending is going bust, of course, and thanks to an almost certain new federal law that the president has vowed to sign, this ending is set to grow unhappier still -- at least for a significant percentage of the one million to one and a half million Americans who file for bankruptcy protection every year and will, as early as this autumn, find it much harder to wipe clean their books and get back on their economic feet. For the credit-card issuers and consumer-finance companies whose well-financed lobbyists backed the bill (whose central provision requires bankrupt debtors with incomes exceeding their statewide median incomes to settle for long-term repayment plans), the results should prove more gratifying.
For a nation whose very founding can be viewed as an attempt to free itself from financial burdens thrust upon it by a distant ruler; for a government that is deeply in the red because of its own spendthrift ways; and for a political leadership whose emissaries have been pressuring other countries to forgive Iraqi debt, such a reform raises questions, to put it mildly. Then again, Americans, as a culture, have never thought or acted consistently on the issue of borrowing and repaying. Our stories on this subject are propelled by a never-ending conflict between two classes of economic antagonists: the thrifty, moralistic Ben Franklin figures who stand for simplicity and responsibility and the spendthrift, zealous Donald Trump types who represent dynamism and raw vigor.
As the financial pages and cable business channels ceaselessly try to persuade their audiences, our current national prosperity depends on mass displays of Trumpish optimism. Buy a digital camera for the home team. Stock up on iPods for Uncle Sam. Impulsively buying luxury goods is touted by our political and business leaders as a crucial civic duty. Whether these patriotic injunctions to break out our MasterCards, hit the malls and propel the financial market to new highs actually influence people's spending habits remains an open question, but they certainly help the little Trumps feel nobler about the spending they do anyway -- particularly the spending they can't afford for items they're not quite sure they need.
And then someone falls ill or is divorced or suffers a loss of emotional self-control and buys a $9,000 plasma TV by taking out a tax-advantaged loan secured by the home where the set was meant to go. A struggle to redeem himself ensues. The credit-card company that first beguiled the debtor with a low-interest ''introductory'' rate announces that because of a tardy payment the previous month, that rate has sextupled to a level once forbidden by usury laws but now perfectly permissible. To shake the plastic monkey off his back, the debtor obtains another low-interest card, shifts his balance to it, misses another payment and is attacked by a second monkey, with fangs.
The next day a letter from the National Guard arrives informing the fellow to pack a duffel bag because he's headed to Iraq. While he's reading these dire words, the telephone rings, but the fellow doesn't answer it because he now knows that the people on the line -- who typically identify themselves with blandly sinister pseudonyms like ''Mrs. Smith'' or, merely, ''Edward'' -- can be counted on to call again just before dawn the next day.
The tragedy reaches its climax at this point. Suddenly the same figures that urged the debtor to shop until he dropped surround his fallen body like hissing Puritans out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne fable. Garbed in steeple hats and bursting with pointed apothegms about pennies saved and rainy days, they close in with their red-hot branding irons and mark his flesh with a shy scarlet ''B,'' after which they type it on a screen connected to every computer in America.
Until recently, the stigma of that B was considered punishment enough for the unfortunate and the imprudent. Sure, it prevented the debtor from obtaining credit (except from those grungy strip-mall ''check advance'' joints that turn a hundred dollars into 50). But under the regulations governing so-called Chapter 7 bankruptcies, it also freed him from further harassment by Mrs. Smith types while (probably) allowing him to keep his car and home and become the protagonist in a new story that takes up where the old one ended. By keeping his feet on the ground like a Franklin and his eyes on the horizon like a Trump, the hero could go on to balance prudence and enthusiasm, caution and vitality and achieve the sort of financial happy ending sought by both individuals and societies.
The new bankruptcy legislation will trap debtors in a story that drags on and on toward a climax that never quite comes and can thus never be fully resolved. Even the farmers who lost their land back when my mother was buying TV's and microwaves with her nifty new BankAmericard were able to put down their plows for good one day and start over as mechanics or insurance agents rather than hanging on as low-paid serfs for the lords of agribusiness who bought their places for pennies on the dollar. But the sharecroppers on the virtual Visa farms and MasterCard plantations of the future won't be able to leave the fields so easily. The rows they'll be hoeing will just go on and on.
Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is the author, most recently, of ''Up in the Air,'' a novel.
