Instant Gratification, Consumer Debt, and Jesus

Americans owe $1.2 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Once you are sunk into credit card debt, it is very difficult to get out of it, as almost everyone knows. The more you owe, the higher the interest rate you get charged, which makes it even harder to pay off your debt.

Credit card debt results mostly from instant gratification. Americans want to buy whatever they want right away, and use their credit lines to do so. I carried credit card debt most of my life. I lived frugally. In my case, it was not instant gratification that I was after, so just living frugally, as I tried to do, is not a guarantee of freedom from credit card debt. I finally paid it off, which saved me a lot of money in interest payments.

American banks want to make it easy for you to get a line of credit. They send out pre-approved credit offers to just about everyone. My daughter received one when she was eight years old. We filled out the application just to see what would happen. It was rejected, of course, but why was it pre-approved in the first place? One advertisement showed the family dog getting a pre-approved credit offer, and then said, who but a dog would put up with 18 percent interest? Banks cast a wide net, irrespective of age or even species.

Then I moved to France and found a very different situation. I wanted to live debt-free, and found that I was practically required to live debt-free. My bank debit card is tied only to my checking account. If I were to overspend my checking account, the payment would not necessarily be refused, but I would get a call from my personal banker (Thomas) telling me to get my rear in gear and live within my means. For such reasons, credit card debt is practically unknown in France. A writer for Slate online [https://slate.com/business/2025/01/credit-card-spending-france-debit-payments-budgeting-finances.html] had a similar experience.

Instant gratification is nearly the opposite of the kind of life Jesus taught. I don’t think I need to explain this. America is considered a Christian country, France a secular country, but it is in France that people live closer to the manner of which Jesus would approve, in this way as in many others.

The Same Damned Thing Over and Over: A Look at American History

The eternal question for historians is whether history is one damned thing after another or the same damned thing over and over. It appears to be the latter, except for occasional technological or intellectual innovations. The reason is because human nature has remained unaltered since the beginning of the human species. Or even before: a May, 2015 news report said that there is evidence that one pre-Neanderthal Homo heidelbergensis (or H. antecessor) murdered another and dropped the corpse into a pit now known as Sima de los Huesos in Spain over 200,000 years ago.

I have been reading the John Dos Passos novel 1919, which is primarily about the lives of some Americans before, during, and after World War One. Dos Passos used what was at the time a really innovative technique: between the main passages he has fragmented bits of insight in the form of Newsreels and “The Camera Eye.”

In one of these segments, Dos Passos described what was happening during World War One. Sound familiar? He said the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, small farmers are squeezed out, workingmen labor twelve hours a day for a bare living, profits are for the rich, cops and law are for the rich. “Was it for this that the Pilgrims had bent their heads into the storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out of their blunderbusses…”

Today, the income ratio of the richest Americans compared to the poorest is greater than it was in 1919. Even World War One did not end this system of oppression. It took the Great Depression to bring about changes that allowed ordinary people to live decent lives without being crushed by the rich. It is, I believe, reasonable to ask if our current situation can only be remedied when we experience another Great Depression? Perhaps even this would not do it, because in the 2008 Recession, the richest Americans and their corporations claimed that they were Too Big To Fail and demanded (and received) taxpayer money.

Think about this on July 4.