[bombcar]

People will naturally spend beyond their capabilities, and the entire market is built around this (loans for everything is standard now).

The ONLY way to prevent this is to either stop offering loans or force savings in some way (taxes, etc). But apparently both those options are off the books.

[zhdc1]

> The ONLY way to prevent this is to either stop offering loans or force savings in some way (taxes, etc). But apparently both those options are off the books.

This is how the system is actually designed. Social security is a mandatory annuity/savings and disability insurance program. Many countries also have mandatory contributions into their 401K (OECD Pillar 2) equivalents.

Even in the US, where these contributions are mandatory, the tax code is set up to make them extremely desirable for the employer and the employee.

> loans for everything is standard now

Stopping this would be as simple as having an indebtedness line added to the tax code. In many countries, there is a maximum level of debt that a person is allowed to carry. Companies aren't allowed to issue new debt if the repayment for all of their current debt exceeds some percentage of their income.

[AlexandrB]

Anti-usury laws of some kind might help too. Anything over an effective 25% APR (including one-time fees) seems like a trap.

But you're right, there's no political will to do anything like this since consumer debt helps to fuel the economy.

[psi75]

It's not that consumer debt "helps to fuel" the economy; consumer debt is the only reason the economy hasn't collapsed in on itself already.

Henry Ford wasn't a good person. He was a rabid antisemite. But even he knew that he wouldn't be able to sell cars indefinitely if people couldn't afford to buy them, so he raised wages. The bosses, as a class, no longer have to do this. They can make enough fake money out of debt to keep their businesses alive. So that's what they're doing.

All this means we get artificial mediocre prosperity that is contingent on their piles of money getting bigger (i.e., all economic growth, meager as it has been, goes to them). And we know that they are willing to crash everything (or, to give an example that has actually happened, make lots of people sick with Covid-19) to keep themselves in charge and their piles of money growing bigger.

If the consumer debt game ended for some reason, the whole system would collapse immediately.