> Having been raised by a poor-ish single mother, I can remember that at least in the 80s/90s, there was a lot less debt around. At least here, credit cards and

> Having been raised by a poor-ish single mother, I can remember that at least in the 80s/90s, there was a lot less debt around. At least here, credit cards and consumer debt wasn't being handed out like free candy, back then. You had to rely on your salary, and then either get help from family/friends, or the welfare office. My mother had too much pride for that, even though my dads side were loaded. > These days, it seems like poor people are also getting trapped in debt. Everything is driven by debt, and every bill you fall behind on, is compounded by some fee, which is applied the second you're overdue. This all is a side-effect of the one-two punch of aging demographics and switching from pay-as-you-go to defined-contribution retirement schemes. Every debt is someone else's asset, so if the market is demanding more assets, interest rates will fall until asset values rise, debt loads increase, and the market clears. The situation is just cursed, IMHO. If you want to ease conditions, you have to reduce the payments various debtors and tenants make to asset-holders, which is ultimately infeasible on the grounds of impoverishing retirees and ruining pension funds. If you use government spending on this, you either raise taxes or foist off the problem to public borrowing and/or inflation. At the end of the day, the real goods and services that the working public produces but does not consume is the same size as the real goods and services that the non-working public consumes but does not produce; at best you can redistribute spending within these demographics.