Rescuing the Economy

Now, I am like everyone else, I want our economy to improve. There are real problems here that have not been addressed, and as far as I can tell, have been ignored by the current administration. But cutting us each a check for $600 is supposed to help? Isn't that kind of like giving out wheat to starving people?

I am not an economist, obviously, and maybe I am speaking compleetly out of turn here, but this whole idea seems ludicrous to me. I remember how cool it was to get the $600 check from the government when our budget was in surplus during Clinton's second tenure. It feels really bad to me to be given money from a budget that is already deeply in debt. Again, I'm not an economist, so maybe there is a sense to it that I don't see. I was taught that what causes economy's to go down the tube is when our deficit is out of control. The opposite certainly held true, when we were in surplus our economy bloomed (the boom days of the 90's). How is going down further supposed to help?

Rescuing is Never a Good Thing

It seems to me an attempt to "rescue" our failing economy. Rescuing is when you jump in to save someone from something that is happening without really giving a long term solution, it's just a fix to the immediate problem. I'm not fond of rescuing in a small scale, say doing a child's homework for them because they didn't manage their time well and ran out of time. And I am even less fond of the idea of rescuing on such a large scale. I can't imagine the long term consequenses being a good thing, in resucing, they seldom are.

My limited economic education leaves me with the belief that a way to address the problem of our current economic condition would be to look at where our current economic problems exist. The biggest problem, to me, the "white elephant" that no one is talking about is: the unlimited interest rates that lenders can charge borrowers. When lenders are allowed to charge ANY amount they choose for borrowing money; where does that leave borrowers?

Stop the Loan Sharks

Credit card companies can arbitrarily choose to increase your interest rates to whatever they choose if you are even a day late paying your bill. They woo you in with a low interest rate and wait for you to slip up. We all do it sooner or later, no one is perfect. When that happens your income suddenly becomes eaten up with interest fees. How, then, are we supposed to get ahead or stimulate the economy by buying new things when we are paying exhorbetant amounts for the money we borrowed to buy things in the past. This alone puts decreases the average Joe's buying power significantly.

Woe be to the person who finds themselves in need of immediate loans. The "pay day loan" companies are legalizzed loan sharks. When did this become legal? I guess I needed to have paid closer attention to something that was happening because it was not so long ago that charging more than 20% interest was loan sharking. Now these sharks can legally charge 1000% interest, that's right, it's not a typo here, 1000% interest.

Where are Our Lawmakers?

Wouldn't it be more helpful to make loan sharking like this illegal? Doing that one simple thing would put millions of dollars into circulation and out of the hands of the loan sharking credit cards and "pay day loans" people. Talk about a sigh of relief, you'd hear it accross the country.

This is an election year. Why aren't any of the candidates talking about this? I'm currenlty an Obama fan, but ANY candidate that would put the illegalization of loan sharking (over 20% interest) on their platform would win my vote. It would be the best thing to happen to this country in the last 8 years.

What Do You Think?

What do you think? Am I wrong, are you an economist and have more knowledge about this than I do? I would really like to hear from you.