Thu, 12 Jan 2006

Personal bankruptcies hit record last year

Well of course they did , since the new law essentially makes it impossible to clear the slate. If I'm not mistaken, bankruptcy is the only civil proceeding mentioned in the Constitution - our Founding Fathers had lived under the British system of debtor's prison and the workhouse, and found it incompatible with a free society. And while the new law certainly isn't that draconian, it certainly represents a sea-change in legal thinking.

I won't go too far in defending the old bankruptcy code: it was probably too "liberal" (in the literal sense). But the new is decidedly too severe, and that seems to be the way we do things here. The bullseye is in the center of the target for a reason, and it always seems to be the most difficult spot to hit.

The number of consumer bankruptcy filings surged to a record high in 2005 amid changes to bankruptcy law, according to a survey released Wednesday.

(link) [CNN.com]

/Politics | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time