I am tired of a lack of personal responsibility in America. It is never my fault. It's always the person standing next to me. There are thousands of people around the world angry at the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, saying everyone's troubles will be solved if we just tax them more and spread the wealth around. The 99 percent does more to keep itself stuck in that category than the 1 percent ever could. Instead of focusing attention on how much better (you think) our lives would be if only we could hit Billy Donovan and Will Muschamp with 90-percent tax rates, we should focus instead on what we can do with personal finance and consumer decisions that empower us, the 99 percent.
Bank of America recently pulled back its $5-per-month debit card fee in the face of countless petitions and customer complaints. The reality is that if customers were assertive and took an active role in their personal financial decisions, there would be a lot of other fees that would evaporate like that as well. Why do people not pay off their credit cards each month? Except in rare cases, it's your own fault. You could have eaten a PB&J instead of Chipotle. You could have gone to Goodwill and bought $4 jeans instead of those great $100 Gap jeans you got "on sale."
I'm also frustrated that people refuse to blame themselves in part for the housing crisis. If you took out a loan to buy a house that was greater than three times your yearly salary, you helped contribute to the notion that housing prices had nowhere to go but up. It doesn't matter if you are less sophisticated than the banks. Anyone who took out a $500,000 loan to buy a house when he or she only had $50,000 in income is just as responsible for the financial crisis as the big banks that leveraged themselves 30 to 1. If CEOs should be in jail, then anyone who bought a house with a leverage on his or her income of more than 10 to 1 should be as well.
The way we talk about unemployment today, it sounds as if everybody who is not receiving a paycheck is a victim of evil corporations that refuse to hire them. What if a good percentage of them are coasting on their unemployment benefits? The period for these payments is currently 99 weeks. That's almost 2 years receiving pay without working!
In some states, people are receiving both disability and unemployment benefits at the same time and are planning to transition to Social Security payments after that. I think liberal arts degrees provide a fantastic education, but if you major in anthropology, it should be obvious that you are going to have to market yourself more aggressively through internships and extracurricular activities than an accounting major so you can get a job.
If you believe big banks need to be held accountable for their actions, then do something about it that matters. If you are looking for a savings account or a mortgage, try to do business with banks that didn't get bailed out. When deciding where to put your investment dollars, be wary of anyone trying to sell you a product with high fees that are going right in his or her pocket. If millions of Americans changed their personal financial habits, banking salaries would decrease and much of what Occupy Wall Street wants to accomplish would come true without changing any laws or taxes.
Also, if you can't get a job at your former wage, lower your prospects. If you're trying to sell your home and the price is below what you paid for it, suck it up and take the hit if you're doing it for a good reason. The only way we get out of this economic malaise is by individual Americans believing that better times are ahead, by taking ownership for mistakes and by getting over the ones we can't control.
Travis Hornsby is a statistics and economics senior at UF. His column appears on Mondays.
