I feel like such a fool

I looked into credit consolidators, and couldn't find one that didn't sound like a scam... and they wouldn't want to deal with me anyway until I had missed payments and was several months behind and already had creditors hounding me. And here I was looking to avoid that! (I guess it's easier to scam people the more desperate they are.) I seriously considered declaring bankruptcy -- this was just before the bankruptcy laws were about to get more stringent, and the looming deadline of that forced me to make a decision -- and even went so far as to gather the forms and paperwork I'd need. But the thought of bankruptcy made me sick to my stomach. It felt like giving up, and I couldn't bear how much that would make me hate myself. (I don't want to sound like I'm disparaging anyone who's taken that route, because I know the vast majority of people would prefer not to have to.) So I tore up the forms.

To tide me over, I borrowed a bit of money from family -- not a lot; none of us are rich -- and got to work knuckling under. I took whatever jobs I could find, while also ramping up my Web sites, because they were bringing in a little money, too. I cut back everything I could to the barest minimum. I sold every bit of crap I could sell, from my car to old DVDs. To save money, I washed my clothes in the kitchen sink rather than going to the laudromat.

I might be embarrassed to admit a lot of this stuff, except that it worked. I poured every penny I could onto those credit-card balances, and in three years my debt dropped from middle-high five figures spread across four or five accounts to where I am today, with less than 10 percent of that original mountain left on one card with a superlow interest rate, the payments on which are supremely managable. I've also paid back the loan from one family member in full already. I'm no longer living in terror of not being able to pay my bills every month.

And why did I bother? If only I'd been a Wall Street CEO, spending money like a drunken sailor -- spending money I'd lied and cheated to get in the first place! -- making bad bets on anything and everything, I could have lived the high life of designer clothes and round-the-world cruises and God knows what else, and as soon as that uh-oh moment came when I saw disaster looming, I could have run to the Federal government for a handout. Why didn't I think to do that?

But I didn't. Instead, I work hard to scrape together a living. I pay double Social Security taxes because I work for myself. I'm not married and I don't have kids and I don't have a mortgage, so I don't get tax breaks for those.

I'm a good citizen. I literally help old ladies cross the street. I call police officers "sir" even when they look like they're 12 years old and I wonder if their mothers know they're out on the street playing with guns... and even when they're violating my civil rights with their warrantless, no-cause searches of my belongings in the subway. I replaced all the bad old-fashioned lightbulbs in my apartment with green low-wattage fluorescent ones. I recycle. I use mass transit, even though the fares keep going up and the service keeps getting worse and the trains keep getting more crowded.

I've adopted homeless animals, for Christ's sake.

And now, George W. Fucking Bush, after spending the last seven years wiping his ass with the Constitution, wants to finish his simultaneous looting of the American economy for his pals by taking $700 billion $1.8 trillion of money we never had for universal health care, better schools, researching new forms of low-carbon-emitting energy, cleaning up our environment, giving body armor to our soldiers and taking care of them once they come home, finding Osama Bin Laden, rebuilding Lower Manhattan, evacuating poor people from New Orleans, shoring up levees so New Orleans wouldn't have needed to be evacuated in the first place, curing AIDS and cancer, making college affordable for whomever wants to attend, creating an intercity train network that actually works, and a million other progressive things that would make life better for everyone, and give it to people who lied, cheated, stole, exercised poor judgment, and bitched about paying taxes on the small percentage of their ill-gotten gains that they weren't already hiding -- legally and illegally -- from the IRS. And he wants to give them this money with no oversight, no transparency, not even any demands that it be used in any particular way.

Oh, and the man who will decide who gets the money? Hank Paulson... the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who still has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in that company.

I'm so angry that I can barely articulate it, but driftglass does a pretty good job on my behalf.

I'm terrified, too, that this proposal will sail through a Democratic Congress that has continually bent over for this president, and terrified of what it will all mean for the future of our economy.

Certainly, I shouldn't have bothered depriving myself these last few years. Why shouldn't I have simply run up those credit cards even more? What was the worst thing that could happen to me? I own nothing of value, so even if credit cards weren't unsecured debt, there'd be no point in suing me. Why shouldn't I run those cards up again right now, and simply not pay them?

Why shouldn't I party like a drunken sailor right now? I've actually earned it, I think.

Oh, right. Because I'm a responsible adult who knows that our excesses must be paid for, one way or another. I just don't know why I'm gonna have to pay for the excesses of someone else.