62% of all bankruptcies in the US have a direct medical cause, a sharp rise from only 8% in 1980.
"Vast majority" of debt incurred by lavish living indeed!
It must be a surreal world for you, one where it's okay to heap blame upon tens of millions of Americans without seeing one single shred of evidence against them.
$1 trillion of student debt. 64% of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt. 5 million homes foreclosed already, another 5 million in default or foreclosure. Credit card debt is $800 billion, generating an average 16.24% interest on money banks borrow at 3.25%.
First, they seem to fail to understand that the reason credit card debt is marked up from bank debt is that there's a fairly significant risk it's not getting paid back. Later on the same page, they state that 10% is written off as irrecoverable.
Second, "Vast majority" might have been artistic license, and I meant to refer to distressed debt - plenty of people use credit for completely reasonable things and service those loans, or have them restructured in good faith. Student debt is also mostly in that category. In other words, those loans will never be available for OWS to purchase for cents on the dollar.
That said, I'm not at all sure bankruptcies are a meaningful proxy for what kinds of debts are outstanding. Certainly, loans bankrupted on aren't included in this project, as they will already have been "forgiven". I couldn't find a good source (indeed, any source), but I would be very surprised if various bits of consumer credit (credit cards, car loans, store credit etc) aren't a very major chunk of the debt available for OWS to buy.
If OWS singled out medical debt and perhaps even some student loans, or made some other effort to review them to make sure they fit a moral prerequisite for having been screwed by "the 1%", I'd be sympathetic to the project. Instead, they are paying off random strangers credit card bill, while honest people who pay off their credit cards, even when it hurts, are passed over.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/amer...
62% of all bankruptcies in the US have a direct medical cause, a sharp rise from only 8% in 1980.
"Vast majority" of debt incurred by lavish living indeed!
It must be a surreal world for you, one where it's okay to heap blame upon tens of millions of Americans without seeing one single shred of evidence against them.