{"id":273,"date":"2007-05-19T15:10:42","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T19:10:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=273"},"modified":"2007-05-19T15:10:42","modified_gmt":"2007-05-19T19:10:42","slug":"some-notes-on-american-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=273","title":{"rendered":"Some notes on American capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>I wanted a pay-as-you-go sim card. A Radio shack in Greenwich Village offered me the sim on its own for $35 or the sim in a motorola phone for $20. The sheer lunatic profligacy is what strikes one first: that this really quite complicated piece of machinery is essentially given away to sell sims for less than is charged on their own. Then I reflect on charging $35 for a sim on its own. This is just naked punishment for trying to save money.<\/li>\n<li>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/05\/19\/us\/19debt.html?_r=1&amp;hp&amp;oref=slogin\">heartbreaking story<\/a> on the front page of the <span class=\"caps\">NYT <\/span>about a couple and their credit card debts. They earn about $66,000 a year, both working full-time:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<blockquote><p>Their credit card debt came to $22,228, including $380 in monthly finance charges. Interest varied from 12.1 percent to 32.24 percent. The Moellerings also have a mortgage of $93,000 and a home equity loan balance of $68,574, at 8 percent interest.<br \/>\n&#8220;We have friends in the same position,&#8221; said Ms. Moellering, who earns $30,000 a year as an administrative assistant. &#8220;One was off his insurance for a couple weeks and he broke his arm, and they&#8217;re out 25 or 30 thousand. We&#8217;ve talked to them about it. It doesn&#8217;t matter what you do, you always have that credit card debt.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>You may say that they don&#8217;t need any of the things they have borrowed money to buy. I&#8217;ll bet they don&#8217;t. But the rapacity of the banks involved makes me wish the Pope would spend more time denouncing Usury:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>On March 27, Mr. Moellering used a debit card rather than a credit card to make nine purchases, ranging from $5.38 to $48, hoping to avoid finance charges. But he miscalculated their checking account balance. Each purchase incurred an overdraft charge of $32, or a total of $288 in penalties, more than the $221.82 cost of the purchases. (After some pleading, the bank, National City, forgave four of the charges, leaving the Moellerings with $160 in penalties, plus interest on both the fees and the principal.)<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wanted a pay-as-you-go sim card. A Radio shack in Greenwich Village offered me the sim on its own for $35 or the sim in a motorola phone for $20. The sheer lunatic profligacy is what strikes one first: that &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=273\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=273\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}