Dialogue: Can we pay debt we owe to US?

By GARTH GEORGE

Did you read the two-page spread in last weekend's Review and World headed "Planet Hollywood versus rest of world?" If you didn't and you care about this nation and its people, you should have.

It would have been nice to have been able to sit back and read Richard Neville's shocking expose of the sordid reality of the American way of life and to have murmured, "serves the arrogant buggers right."

But that wasn't possible because much of what I read could just as well have applied to today's New Zealand way of life and, in fact, in some areas we out-American the Americans.

Like the fact that in the US the salaries of chief executives have jumped 481 per cent, while workers' pay has risen 28 per cent. I suspect the salaries of our chief executives, too, have risen by several hundred per cent in that time, but workers' pay up 28 per cent? Don't we all wish.

The truth is that the disposable income of the worker in this country has, in fact, dropped over the past 10 years by something like 10 per cent while prices have continued to rise.

And don't try to tell me that the inflation rate is what the Government from time to time tells us it is. If it is, I wonder why a family I know, with two growing pre-teen boys, are paying the milkman $99.70 a month where not long ago they were paying $72.80 for the same quantity of his products.

But I digress. In his recitation of the rampant consumerism and prodigal waste of natural resources in the US promoted by big business and their advertising agencies, Neville asks why the most prosperous nation on Earth exhibits the highest rates of clinical depression. "The country that wrote the happiness quest into its Constitution," he says, "reels from an epidemic of malignant sadness."

Strike a chord? Didn't I read just the other day that New Zealand's drug bill for happiness pills, including the latest one, Prozac, runs into multimillions of dollars?

So aren't too many of us refusing to face up to our personal and relationship problems and simply dissolving them in a chemically induced euphoria?

You bet we are - and I'll tell you one thing for sure: the chemicals do nothing about the problems and when the pills stop working, as they invariably do, the problems will still be there - only bigger and nastier.

Having read Neville's piece, it was no surprise to come to the Life section and find Cathrin Schaer's lead item on conspicuous consumption (affluenza for short) headed "Keeping up with the big noters."

She points out that the spending of the super rich has always been conspicuous (I would say obscene) but that now, "the runaway spending of the rich [has] spawned a luxury fever that, to one degree or another, has all of us in its grip."

Not all of us, Ms Schaer. A week or so ago this newspaper recorded that the national credit-card debt was about to hit $3 billion. Well, I can happily tell you that not one single cent of it belongs to my wife or me.

Just before we returned from Australia in 1988, we paid off our credit cards and cut them up. We have had none since, nor, because we resolved at that time not to, have we entered into any hire-purchase agreements.

Everything we own, except our home but including our two cars, is debt free. As far as we are concerned, a mortgage is the only credit that's legitimate.

But don't blame your average Kiwi for this outbreak of conspicuous consumption and the resultant rise in credit-card debt, which is going up at a faster rate than incomes. Blame the advertising agencies and the suppliers of goods and services who hire them - and the banks.

In a mall the other day, a team of youngsters was accosting shoppers and offering to sign them up for a credit card with an automatic limit of $500, no doubt at some usurious rate of interest. Many of those seen to sign up did not appear to be good credit risks.

And now people can buy food and electricity on their credit cards. I would have thought that if anyone had to use a credit card to buy either, it would be a good indication they were in financial trouble.

My heart goes out to those who struggle under the burden of credit-card debt, and those who soon will. Debt is the worst and most vicious form of bondage - and there's no pill available to relieve it.