A little while back the Wall Street Journal ran a pair of articles about things we should do in preparation for the inevitable effects of the federal budget deficit. Brett Arends led off on February 4 with The Deficit: How to Protect Yourself and then on the 6th we got a round up of advice from most of the rest of the WSJ staff in Protecting Yourself from the Giant New Deficit: How to Keep the Scary U.S. Debt From Eating Up Your Assets.
To a degree, items like these almost comically miss the big picture. They remind me of pieces popular a while back that said that in anticipation of global warming we should all buy land in the Canadian interior. If the government continues on its present course, and I for one am not ready to concede that that is a certainty, it will be an economic calamity that will make us all drastically worse off. The best thing a person can do about the deficit is to vote for leaders willing to do the ugly and unpopular things necessary to reduce it.
But if you can ignore the big picture and focus on only the near term effects of the current and upcoming deficits, it is possible to come up with some coherent advice. Not that the crew at the WSJ consistently do this.
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In some ways, the CARD Act of 2009 was everything health care reform was not. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support, passing the House and Senate by 361-64 and 90-5 respectively. It dealt with topics familiar to most Americans in simple terms. And it was refreshingly short, at only 33 pages.
A person might think that would make it a model for other legislation, an example of how effective government can be if reasonable people cast aside their partisan differences and write simple rules to make our lives better.
Then again, maybe not.
The act packs quite a few provisions into its 33 pages. Many of those may turn out to work just as expected. But an examination of what I consider to be one of the more ill-conceived provisions, the ban on issuing credit cards to those under 21 years of age, reveals a yawning gap between what we thought the law would do and what it really does.
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Most of the Credit CARD Act of 2009, that well crafted and thoroughly thought through law that will fix all that is wrong about credit cards and allow us to carry guns in National Parks, comes into effect on February 22nd. So it’s time for bloggers like me to revisit the act, particularly some of the less widely 
discussed provisions, and tell our readers all about the big changes on the way.
Wallet Pop beat me to it last week with a post Lenders plan to guess your income from credit report. It was about how the CARD Act "requires lenders to consider your ability to pay any new or additional debt before approving a credit card application." Apparently, that means verifying income, which puts a damper on those really annoying pitches you get to open a store-branded card whenever you try to buy something.
"Retail stores are quite upset about this change in the instant approval of their cards," Bill Hardekopf, CEO of LowCards.com, wrote to WalletPop by e-mail. "Consumers now need to show proof of income when they apply for a card, and not many of us carry this around when we are shopping in the mall."
This made me, briefly, optimistic that the CARD Act would improve my life after all. I hate it when the salesgirl extends the time it takes to check out by asking me if I’d like to save 10% and open a new account. That’s three seconds of my life I can never get back. The only thing worse is when she asks the guy in front of me on line and he says yes.
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It is time to revisit a topic we have been looking in on every few months for the past year. I am referring to the government’s program to help people stay in their homes through modifying the terms of their mortgage.
When the program was first announced to great fanfare in March, I observed that nobody outside the Treasury seemed to think it would work. Only two months later I had a little fun pointing out how, even by then, it was pretty obvious it was going to miss its unrealistic goals by at least an order of magnitude. By July I was writing about the inevitable finger-pointing that followed the revelation that a program nobody believed in was not, in fact, working very well.
Of course, the Home Affordable Modification Program is still running, and still bravely defended by administration officials with a straight face. And they sure are brave. Last week The New York Times told us that U.S. Mortgage Plan Aided 7 Percent of Borrowers. That figure, apparently, refers to 7 percent of the 853,696 borrowers enrolled in the program, not 7 percent of all borrowers.
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Back on the web now. My apologies to everybody who missed me. Living without broadband for two days was quite an experience. It would make a good reality show, maybe for PBS: 1980s House.
Speaking of being wired up and of decades past, when I sat down to catch 
up on what I had missed I came across a wonderful item. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the voluntary recall of nine books on home improvement. Printed in China with lead-based ink? Not exactly.
The books contain errors in the technical diagrams and wiring instructions that could lead consumers to incorrectly install or repair electrical wiring, posing an electrical shock or fire hazard to consumers.
Several aspects of this story amuse and/or fascinate me. And there are implications for that other great and dangerous DIY area, personal finance.
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Economics, Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
February 16, 2010 12:59 pm | 
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