Household Debts

Household debt is the amount of money that households have borrowed and need to re-pay. Their most recent data indicate that households or in debt somewhere around $14 trillion. Most of that $14 trillion, $9 trillion or so is debt that's due for mortgages and the rest of the debt are things like cars, college debt which is growing and becoming a problem and credit card debt. I think it's not just the bottom and that certainly greater at the bottom and since they have less income and less ability to get out of debt but it also is becoming a problem for the middle class. Income data, the poverty data is supposed to measure household standard of living and household standard of living is not just how much money you make how much money you have to spend on the necessities and the problem is the interest that you're paying back on the debt that you have can't be used to buy new goods and services because you're using it to pay for old stuff and so your actual standard of living is much lower because of all of the interest that you're paying. I think the figure is somewhere around $5000 per household in the United States is now going to pay interest just on household debt and that figure has been growing and growing and growing and growing. And if you just look at the income figures in the US, those figures have been relatively constant since the late 1980's early 1990's...