Bankruptcy Day

Social Security has been getting all the publicity, so now the Republican's are pushing through a bill that not many have heard of.

It never ceases to amaze me that lower and middle class people vote Republican. Many even actively support them. Well, considering what I wrote yesterday about the archetypical conservative, it's really not surprising I guess.

Some specific questions to ask....

# Why are senators allowing multi-millionaires to shield their assets but not average families? Under the bill, the very wealthy would be able to shield millions in assets after declaring bankruptcy by setting up "asset protection trusts." Schumer lamented "now we have a bill that says a family won't be protected if it has $50,000, but it will if it has $5 million.

# Why are senators going after seniors with huge medical bills? The bill will be especially hard on elderly Americans, who are bankrupted by medical bills with increasing frequency.

# Democratic and Republican senators should put the interests of Americans above those of the credit card industry. The credit card industry raked in $30 billion in profits last year, some of which is clearly being spent to grease the palms of Washington politicians. Bankruptcy hasn't hurt the credit card companies one iota.

via atrios:

The ever-englightened Paul Krugman has this to say:

But the bill also fits into the broader context of what Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, calls "risk privatization": a steady erosion of the protection the government provides against personal misfortune, even as ordinary families face ever-growing economic insecurity.

A vast majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of severe misfortune. One recent study found that more than half of bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies. The rest are overwhelmingly the result either of job loss or of divorce.

To the extent that there is significant abuse of the system, it's concentrated among the wealthy

the underlying economic trends have been reinforced by an ideologically driven effort to strip away the protections the government used to provide. For example, long-term unemployment has become much more common, but unemployment benefits expire sooner. Health insurance coverage is declining, but new initiatives like health savings accounts (introduced in the 2003 Medicare bill), rather than discouraging that trend, further undermine the incentives of employers to provide coverage.

Above all, of course, at a time when ever-fewer workers can count on pensions from their employers, the current administration wants to phase out Social Security.

The bankruptcy bill fits right into this picture.
Warren Buffett recently made headlines by saying America is more likely to turn into a "sharecroppers' society" than an "ownership society." But I think the right term is a "debt peonage" society - after the system, prevalent in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for their creditors. The bankruptcy bill won't get us back to those bad old days all by itself, but it's a significant step in that direction

Do the freepers have a point of view on this, or do they just ignore it? I'm curious to see Oxen's take on his blog. I'm curious to see him expound on how great it is.

Or - will he just ignore it like a good little freeper. Surely Oxen won't mind if he has a major calamity, say a health care related issue, and now his buddies in the Republican party leave him on the hook for the bill. Have any problem with the wealthy continuing to shelter their assets?