Kids, I’ve been down that rocky,
pothole-filled road known as Financial
Disaster Due to Excessive Use of
Credit Cards, and I’m here to ensure
that you don’t wind up in the break
down lane. It’s an ugly, ugly place, and
trust me, you really don’t want to go
there.
While charging a cherry Jolly
Rancher at the bookstore last week, I
was elated to discover a little gem of a
guide called “Credit Rules.” This is a
bookmark-sized pamphlet put out by
the Federal Trade Commission on how
to manage credit cards once you’ve got
ten your grubby little hands on them.
According to the FTC, there are six
official credit rules (and one asterisked
note!) that we should all pay careful
attention to. Let’s break them down
together, shall we?
Rule One: Credit cards are just like
a loan -you have to pay what you owe.
Now, if you are a freshman or just a
highly inexperienced upper-classman,
and you’re asking yourself, “Duh ...
what’s a loan?” I’d like to personally
smack you upside the head. For the rest
murmur ... murmur ... murmur
... murmur... murmur...
A hell of a battle took place
between Bill Bradley and A1 Gore in
Des Moines on Saturday at Iowa’s
annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner. If
there was any question that Bradley
was a threat to Gore before their spar
ring match, there isn’t any now.
It had all the trappings of two
heavyweight boxers puffing out their
chests vyith a little pre-fight banter.
Gore claimed Bradley bailed for cover
when the Republican revolution
occurred in 1994. Gore chided
, Bradley for bailing on farmers.
Even Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin was
on hand to say Bradley wasn’t his
“type of Democrat.” Bradley kept to
the high road - largely because he,
right now, is the chic pick. After all,
nobody ever gave him much of a
chance anyway, and here he is, right in
the middle of things.
While radical & j
It’s in the cards
Keep spending with credit cards limited and legal
of you who are enlightened, yeah, you
actually have to pay back what you
charge to your card.
This is a very difficult concept to
understand when you have a little piece
of plastic in your hand that makes you
feel like you’re getting stuff for free. If
you don’t pay your debts off, you could
spend some fun time in bankruptcy
court. This is currently what I’m trying
to avoid. Good times.
Rule Two: Keep track of how much
you spend. Remember that incidental
and impulse purchases add up fast.
Yes indeed, those trips to Amigos
and Super K can turn into a big ol’ pile
of debt before you know it.
I can’t tell you how crucial it is to
pay attention to where your little cards
have been. I’d had mine for only a cou
ple of weeks, and before I knew it, I had
a wallet full of dirty little plastic
whores. They were all over the place,
and I had no idea where all of those
magnetic strips had been swiped.
Rule Three: Save your receipts.
Compare them with your monthly bill.
Promptly report problems to the com
pany ... blah, blah, blah.
God knows those little receipts are
lost in an over-stuffed backpack more
easily than your homework. But, for
Pete’s sake, hang on to ’em for no rea
son other than to look at them a few
days after they’ve been printed and kick
yourself repeatedly for how stupid you
were for buying your roommates pizza
and beer.
And I doubt you’ll have accuracy
problems. Nothing gets by the credit
card Nazis.
Rule Four: Never lend your card to
anyone.
Not even your Mom, babe. Trust no
one when it comes to plasti-cash.
Rule Five: Owing more than you
can repay can damage your credit rat
ing. That can make it hard to finance a
car, rent an apartment, get insurance -
even get a job.
I learned recently that my freshly
developed bad credit rating will proba
bly follow me around for the next seven
years. Seven years.
That’s longer than it’s going to take
me to graduate from this school. The
sad reality of bad credit is that it’s
embarrassing. When you have to have a
co-signer to purchase an asparagus
spear, it’s a sad, sad life I’m, er, you ’re
living.
Rule Six: Pay your bill on time, and
in full when possible. If you don't, you ’ll
have to pay finance charges on the
unpaid balance - and it takes jorever to
get caught up if you just, pay the mini
mum.
It’s pretty easy to pay the minimum
balance when it’s 10 bucks, but here’s a
tip: If you keep paying 10 bucks a
month, you’ll be paying ‘til you’re 112
years old. If you’ve ever tried to pay off
anything with an 18 percent interest
rate attached to it, you know that it’s
about as impossible as finding a non
white trash guest on Springer.
If you credit card-less fools
absolutely insist on getting a card, I’d
«
I’d had mine for only c
before I knew it, I hac
little plastic whores. 7
place, and I had no ic
magnetic strips l
recommend getting an American
Express card. You’re required to pay off
your balance every month, which, in
theory, is really what you should be able
to do anyway. If you’re not going to be
able to do that, DON’T GET A CRED
IT CARD. Pretty simple.
* Federal law limits your liability
for unauthorized charges to $50 per
card.
Please note: This does not mean
that if you have a $700 bill coming your
way that you should leave your card out
for someone to steal, thinking you’d
have to pay only that 50 bucks. This
would be a brilliant idea, but apparently
you’d have to prove that you didn’t
chaige that $700. Good luck.
Standing there in the bookstore
with my bookmark-sized, er, book
mark, all I could think was, “Why in
heckfire didn’t they put this out four
years ago when I really needed it? This
could have saved me years of shame
and despair! I hate the Federal Trade
Commission!”
Well, I don’t really hate the FTC. I
Erin Reitz is a senior theater performance major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
Playing the odds
If Democratic voters want a Democrat in office, Gore is the only way to win
Republicans try their darndest to
knock presidential hopeful George W.
Bush off his bird’s eye perch (memo to
Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes: it
ain’t happenin’), the Democratic pres
idential game seems to be heating up.
And unlike the Republican race,
which was decided long ago, the time
for Bradley to usurp Gore is now.
Gore knows it.
Bradley’s making a run, serious
enough to get himself on the cover of
Time magazine. Now you know that’s
a big deal. And Gore, a man who has
gone decidedly unchallenged for so
long, has started to sweat. The mur
murs and the whispers have become
audible.
Gore’s moved his political home
base from Washington back to home
state Tennessee, which is a mighty
wise move. Mighty wise.
Regardless of what Bradley can
do, it’s important to understand that if
there is a man who can beat Bush, it is
A1 Gore. Those who champion
Bradley, including myself, lament this
fact, but it’s an undeniable statistical
truth. If the Democrats want a presi
dent in the White House come 2001,
they must push Gore. The
southern
United States leaves them no choice.
A particularly insightful editorial
in The Washington Post on Sunday
sheds light on that notion. Patrick
Reddy, the pollster for California’s
State Assembly for Democrats, nails
the presidential race right on the head.
The numbers Reddy pushes are
these: The South controls 29 percent
of the electoral vote. Bush, a Texan,
whose brother, Jeb, is the governor of
Florida, plans to do very well in the
South. If the Democrats get shut out
there, it’s lights-out for the cause. So
the old donkey needs southerner Gore
to pull through the primary, plain and
simple.
Time was, the South was a com
plete bastion of Democratic strength.
It holds 20 percent of the minorities in
America, who usually vote Democrat.
The entrenched white South has
been strongly Democrat since the
Civil War, when Southerners figured
it was the Republican Party that want
ed to destroy them.
Reddy points to the death of
Franklin Roosevelt as the beginning of
the white Southern Democrat erosion.
While John F. Kennedy still carried
the South in his narrow victory over
Nixon in 1960, his successor, Lyndon
B. Johnson, cemented white
Southern hate with his
Republicans the South for the next 50
years.
And largely, he was right.
Religious developments in the last 10
years have further polarized the South
as white vs. black, - the blacks being
Democrats; whites, Republicans.
Since 1964, Reddy points out,
Democrats have averaged less than 33
percent of the white vote.
Furthermore, out of the four
Northern Democrat presidential can
didates since 1964, only one, Hubert
Humphrey, has captured a Southern
state, Texas, in 1968. The other three,
Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale
and George McGovern, haven’t won
any. Consequently, they lost handily.
Bradley, a fiscal conservative, lib
eral socialist, is the quintessential New
Northern Democrat. Bom and raised
there. Pro-welfare. Hell, he even
played the most Northern of all pro
fessional sports: basketball. So even
though Gore accuses Bradley of being
an elephant in donkey's clothing, it is
Gore who represents a better choice
for conservative white Southerners.
Either one of them could win the
minority vote, as Republicans have
rarely offered minorities a positive
outlook. But the key, Reddy asserts, is
the white South, whose money and
influence can make or break the next
election.
That has got Gore whistlin’ Dixie.
Say Bradley wins the nomination
and loses every Southern state, which
he probably would. He’d have to win
every industrial state - Michigan,
Illinois, Ohio and New Jersey - to
have a chance at the presidency. All of
those states have had Republican gov
Civil Rights Act,
signed in 1964.
He commented
at the time he
had
hand
ed
the
Samuel McKewon is a news-editorial and political science major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
r couple of weeks, and
l a wallet full of dirty
"hey were all over the
lea where all of those
lad been swiped.
hate the predicament that I’ve gotten
myself into over the last few years. And
believe me, trying to get myself out of it
has been no picnic.
I wish that I would have listened to
my parents when they tried to convince
me that I’d end up screwing myself in
the end if I gave in to the evil credit
machine. I told everyone that I was
going to use it only for emergencies, but
after awhile, everything became an
emergency.
Fellow students, listen to me, and
listen well. Credit cards can become the
scourge of your day-to-day existence if
you’re not careful with them.
Sure, go ahead and get yourself a
bag of M&M’s and a Visa T-shirt, but
only if you’re ready to handle every
thing that goes along with them. Heck,
get your candy and then cut up the card
when they send it. That way you can
enjoy your goodies and stay out of trou
ble, just like Mom would want you to.
The moral of the story is this: Keep
your head about you and your card in
your pants. Believe me, you’ll thank me
u
Because whether I or any other Bradley
supporter likes it, the road to the White
House must pass through Al and Tippers
explicit lyric-free and ecologically sound
household.
emors and GOP majorities during the
1990s. And get this: A couple of those
states, Reddy points out, have large
Baptist populations just like the South.
Gore, who has fared well in the
South in the past, could carry those
people, too.
But here’s the quandary: Early pri
maries are New Hampshire, New York
and California. Bradley just might win
them all. And Gore might be finished,
which is why the vice president is
putting on the press right now.
Now is key to what Saturday
night’s fireworks were all about.
Any nominee still faces a daunting
opponent in Bush, who hasn’t even
broken a sweat yet in his campaign.
Gore, who didn’t expect to, is per
spiring freely.
It’s painful to see politics come
down to numbers, and though we
believe it just got invented 10 years
ago, it's been around forever.
It's called playing the odds, and
Gore, though he may not have them in
the primary, is the only one who can
have them in the general.
The AFL-CIO is probably days
away from officially backing Gore.
Same goes for other groups. And
they’re smart for doing it. Other Dems
should get in line. Because whether I
or any other Bradley-supporter likes it,
the road to the White House must pass
through A1 and Tipper’s explicit lyric
free and ecologically sound house
hold. It’s the only way it can be.
If Democrats want a Democrat in
the White House, it will have to be
Gore. History doesn’t have a habit of
lying, especially when it still exists in
die present.