Not everyone is immune from what are fashionably described as "bad choices".And what if you are living on one of those estates where there is no mainstream supermarket for miles and no public transport to reach one? Fruit and vegetables at the corner shop are expensive and poor quality, if they are sold there at all. Might not driving lessons and a second-hand car be an investment fully as productive as a university degree?These are not the sort of choices that our central bankers and cabinet ministers often have to make themselves. They have a real nerve chastising the rest of us about credit.If those living at the margin have little choice about running up debts and still less about the terms they accept, the better-off surely have no excuse On the contrary. With interest rates so low, why on earth should we save rather than spend? It is all very well the Government telling us that the current generation of workers faces a pensions crisis, but whose fault is that? Existing funds have suffered from the changed tax regime and crashing share values. Savings held in deposit currently pay barely 2 per cent after tax (and less if you are in a higher tax bracket) Shop around, they tell us, for the best "deal".
That means interest of less than 4 per cent before tax.With borrowing rates as low as they are, it makes more sense to spend than save, even if that spending entails borrowing. And for all their pleas that we should save, it suits the Government too, because our spending, even on tick, keeps the country's economy growing. It creates the illusion that our economy is outperforming the economies of the eurozone, even though much of our prosperity is fuelled by credit. If the Government really wants us to save, then the Bank of England will have to raise interest rates. The risk then, I suspect, is less that we will all be bankrupted by our mortgages than that we will scale back our spending.My generation is also informed by our experience. Contrary to what the Government tells us, the lesson I have absorbed is not one of house prices that go up and never come down.
It is rather that a relatively small amount of borrowed money can make a very big difference - as much for middle- and upper-income earners as for the poor. Looking back, we would be infinitely better off now if, each time we had moved, we had pushed our mortgage borrowing to the very limit, even when interest rates were high We played safe. Those of a more entrepreneurial bent or cushioned by family money have profited mightily not from the cash they had in hand, but from their readiness to borrow that bit extra.The prognosis for the economy now may well be quite different: low interest rates, low inflation, debts that do not melt away in real terms as they used to. But I would not mind betting that the well-padded gents who are now warning us so apocalyptically against stretching our credit are the very same people whose confident borrowing two or three decades ago effectively bought them financial security for life.m.dejevsky independent.co.uk More from Mary Dejevsky. Yet again, many Westerners have interpreted events in Iraq through the filter of their own prejudices. Whenever there is a development in that battered country, they do not bother to think about the views of actual, real Iraqi people; no, they simply and arrogantly assume that they already know what Iraqis think.
One letter writer to this newspaper captured this mindset perfectly yesterday when he said: "Your editorial [about the bombing of the UN centre in Baghdad] misses the point that Iraqis are trying to make. The message is simple: End the occupation". The people who murdered 24 UN aid workers who had come to help Iraqis rebuild their country represented nobody but themselves. To say that they are weather-vanes of Iraqi public opinion is as false as saying that the Baader-Meinhof gang revealed that an underlying majority of Germans in the 1970s wanted a violent revolution, or that Animal Liberation Front attacks on scientists reveal a deep hostility to animal testing among British people today. Unlike our letter writer, I am not basing this statement on guesswork, or on some telepathic link with the Iraqi people. I am basing it on all the available evidence of what real Iraqis actually think.Channel 4 News - which is well known for taking a broadly anti-war line - commissioned an opinion poll in Iraq last month. Its findings were remarkably similar to all the other polls conducted by the international media.
