How Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren Demolished the Conventional Wisdom on Debt

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/23738-how-thomas-piketty-and-elizabeth-warren-demolished-the-conventional-wisdom-on-debt

In a recent study, Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, sought to test whether those with credit card debt were the profligates portrayed by popular culture. She used a national survey of 1,997 households to create two groups indistinguishable in terms of income, race, age, marital status and rate of homeownership. The only difference? One group had credit card debt, the other group didn’t. Traub finds that the households without debt had more assets, and fell back on them when dealing with unexpected expenses. She finds “little evidence” that “households with credit card debt are less responsible in their spending habits than households that do not have accumulated debt.” Instead, she finds that unemployment, children, lack of education, lack of health insurance and negative home equity correlate strongly with high levels of debt.

In their famous book on the subject, “The Two-Income Trap,” Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi argue that slowing income growth, not overspending, is what’s driving families into debt. In an essay on Boston Review they write that,

There is no evidence of any ‘epidemic’ of overspending—certainly nothing that could explain a 255 percent increase in the foreclosure rate, a 430 percent increase in the bankruptcy rolls, and a 570 percent increase in credit-card debt.

The Warrens point to the increasing cost of education and housing. A 2000 study performed in Fresno, California, found that the most important determinant of neighborhood housing prices was school quality. The strongest evidence that the Warrens cite is that between 1984 and 2001 housing prices for those with one or more children increased at three times the rate of those without children. As families have tried to provide for the education for their children, they have increasingly been squeezed by high housing costs.

The final factor driving debt is unscrupulous practices by banking institutions.The CARD Act is saving Americans $12.6 billion a year by cutting back dodgy fees and other shady practices. But payday lenders can still prey on the poor. Traub finds that households with higher levels of credit card debt were more likely to have received financing from payday lenders. We need policies to give poor and middle-class workers more income and wealth. Increasing the minimum wage is a simple start. Incentivizing worker ownership and profit-sharing would also benefit workers. The government could give citizens a small basic income each year and it could also institute a “baby bond” policy, which would foster wealth building. On the other side, it needs to bust up concentrated and idle wealth by taxing it.

As Piketty notes in his interview with Matthew Yglesias, “My point is to increase wealth mobility and to increase access to wealth.” He aims to “reduce taxation of wealth for most people, but to increase it for those who already have a lot of wealth.” By spreading wealth to the middle class and poor, we could decrease the reliance on the “plastic safety net,” and create a strong and sustainable middle class.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for Elizabeth Warren. n/t

-Laelth