I always wonder what they consider 'debt' on these graphs. All my monthly expenses go on my credit card, then I pay it all off the following month. It's about $1,000 each month. Do they think I have $1,000 of credit card debt?
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
49 points (100.0% liked)
United States | News & Politics
3174 readers
781 users here now
Welcome to !usa@midwest.social, where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Yes and in the credit card industry they call people who pay off their card in full at the end of each month, which means you pay no interest Deadbeats. I am happy to be a dead beat to the credit card companies.
Teaching my son how to use his credit now. Use it for everything you would use your debit card or cash and use said cash to pay off card. Because unfortunately we have a fuck up credit system and only way to build credit is to be in debt.
What's up with the vertical line in 2010? Looks like credit literally doubled overnight. And in 2020 it went down? Guess those stimulus checks helped.
2010, vaguely remember a change in credit/debt reporting related to the crash. Found this while searching, rules changed in July 2010. In theory, actual debt didn't change, but it shows how vastly accounting can shift numbers around. Is the data accurate now?
2020, consumer debt 'only' dropped by ~120 billion, supposedly ~3 trillion was distributed through stimulus, kinda lines up.
You da man!! 👉👉
CW: leftism
Here's a concept that we don't think about often: Money is not wealth. Wealth is stuff, things, goods that make life better, or even just possible. It's just that in an advanced, industrialized, market economy, money is so trivially exchanged for wealth that we confuse the concepts.
But think about a billionaire dropped off in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness in the middle of winter. In that situation, wealth means food, warm clothing, firewood, tools to construct a shelter with, y'know, the things that would let him survive. Money is not wealth, except perhaps if he had billions of dollars in cash with him. Cash could be wealth, in that it's a material object that he could stack to build shelter, stuff in his clothing for insulation, to burn for warmth. But intangible money is not wealth.
So, the fact that all of those American citizens were able to buy things with credit shows that the United States is a fabulously wealthy nation. We can provide materially for everybody! What's more, the billionaire class is also fabulously wealthy, with an enormous share of the material bounty that our advanced, industrialized economy can produce.
See where I'm going with this? "Debt" is just numbers in a computer. Again, money is not wealth; the wealth was produced and distributed without money, but with this fake concept called debt attached. We could just wipe the ledger clean, erase all of the debt, and it wouldn't materially harm anybody. (In fact, it would benefit tens of millions of people.) The lenders already have their material needs fulfilled hundreds of times over. Nobody would starve. Nobody would even have to cancel their vacation.
Something to think about.