Source: Alternet
America is very wealthy country, but one has to wonder how much of our wealth is in fact a chimera, spun of a consumerist ideal and given the appearance of solidity by a flood of easy credit? How much poverty and real economic pain is covered up by an endless succession of pay-day loans and EZ-finance rip-offs that eventually just bury people under mountains of debt from which they have little chance of digging themselves out.

Today’s bankruptcy rate is ten times what it was during the Great Depression, foreclosures are at a 37-year high and the United States has a negative savings rate, yet we’re told every day that the economy is going gangbusters. George W. Bush often points out that more Americans own their own homes today than ever before. He doesn’t mention that they also have less equity in those homes than ever before. Every day brings news of the potential scope of the emerging “sub-prime” loan scandal — what Robert Kuttner called “deregulation’s latest gift” — and new indicators that the housing market that’s driven so much of the economy for the past five years is a bubble that’s begun to burst right before our eyes. Compounding our personal debt problems are our representatives, equally profligate spenders who are just as happy to run up enormous budget deficits and who reflexively guarantee and subsidize trillions of dollars of new loans to already strapped American businesses and consumers.

It’s a pretty good time to ask ourselves just how we got here.