Customer Reviews

Up to Our Eyeballs: The Hidden Truths and Consequences of Debt in Today's America

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found Up To Your Eyeballs to be a fair, mostly non-partisan, balanced look at our broken financial system. The authors show how credit cards and debt have become the new safety net for middle class Americans. Regulation of credit card firms has been practically non-existent, and they expose how federal regulators have let credit card hawkers get away with a slew of tricks and traps that lure unsuspecting Americans into a perpetual pit of debt. The poor, the sick, the most vulnerable elements of our society get hurt the most.

And it confirms my own experience. I hate MasterCard. They send periodic letters changing the terms of the agreement with such tiny print that I feel exhausted even looking at it. I'm afraid to miss one payment lest they boost the interest rate to something stratospheric. They've kept upping the late fees, and shortening the window of time when payment is due. And I have no control over their rules. They're not honest. They're shady, conspiratorial, hiding in fine print and tricks and traps. It's a mean game they play and I hope I don't get caught up in their net, but it's possible, and I see every sign that the US government has been complicit in the shadiness. But, everybody needs a credit card these days, so I can't slice it up and put it in the garbage.

A big point the authors make is exposing the myth that Americans rack up excessive debt by being greedy and selfish and blinded by consumerism. The truth is that most cases of indebtedness come from the removal of the safety net, such as sickness, divorce, job loss, higher college payments. The mortgage industry, running rampant, encouraged people to buy more housing than they needed with teaser loans and fraudulent loan terms and sleazy hard-to-explain plans like balloon payments, and this worsened the crisis. Throughout, federal government, which has taken it upon itself to be the main economic regulator, was "asleep at the switch" as they rightly point out.

Where I disagree with the authors, however, is with their prescriptions of how to fix the system. They offer a reasonable-sounding Democratic agenda with some helpful policy prescriptions that stand a good chance of being enacted given the recent election of a Democratic president, such as more transparent regulation and a neutral regulatory authority. Still, I feel the problems with America are much deeper than the authors point out -- the political process is broken -- and in my view, the debt crisis is only one symptom of a more serious problem. Other symptoms include rampant partisanship, corruption in Washington, dangerous concentration of power in Washington in the presidency, gridlock, a politicized Supreme Court, rigged re-election rules, gerrymandering, money running everything.

I recommend this well written and intelligent look at the indebtedness problem.

Thomas W. Sulcer

author of "The Second Constitution of the United States"

(free on web -- google title above + sulcer)

This book is extremely ideological - anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, etc. Given the authors' affiliations (Demos - a far left think tank), this is not surprising. The points/arguments advanced throughout the book are one sided and the only time the authors discuss the personal responsibility of individuals for their own debt levels is to excuse it and explain it away.

In contrast, the policy recommendations are (for the most part) quite reasonable and are not terribly ideological. Rather than buying this book, I recommend checking it out from your local library and skipping straight to the chapter on policy recommendations. The chapter on the history of credit is also worth a read.