Bankruptcy changes

I'm not completely up to date on the changes to the bankruptcy codes, but one thing I understand is that once they are enacted, there will be no forgiveness of credit card debt from declarations of bankruptcy. I might not be completely correct on that summarization, as I haven't studied it, but that's how I understand it to be.

My friend and I were recently discussing the effect of this and pretty much decided it was a bad thing, something pressed for by the lobbyists for the credit card companies to be able to milk poor people who get behind and can't catch up. I suggested that for every person who gets hit with a spate of bad luck and don't have the means to catch up once they get behind (and I do believe that there are many of these people), there is at least one person who ran up all their credit cards with charges at Macy's, Sears, Wal-Mart, etc. and then, when they had an emergency where they needed that emergency money that credit can provide, it's not there. I do have some trouble empathizing with those people, as, had they exercised some restraint and not maxed out the credit cards that they could barely afford to keep paying the minimum balance on, then they wouldn't have found themselves in the pickle they're in.

I do think, however, that some responsibility must be borne by the credit card companies. Perhaps there should be a penalty or transfer of liability for that money to the agent who extends credit to someone who already has copious credit, and many credit cards. Perhaps there's a way to ensure that credit card companies don't prey on the weak, meek and unintelligent. Perhaps they shouldn't get to reap benefits from overextending credit to someone who's already stretched fairly thin. Maybe there should be a personal cap on credit extensions for credit cards to the amount of money a person earns in a month, or a year, or something like that (I don't know any right answer here, I'm just postulating). But I think credit card companies need to be more discriminating with whom they grant cards before they should reasonably expect credit card debt to be repaid after bankruptcy.