John Gordon’s English Weblog

I was struck by the following sentence in this article from the New York Times:

A good indicator that things are going in the wrong direction, he said, is if your credit card balance has been rising in the last year but your savings balance has been falling.

Is there ever any reason to not use whatever you have in a savings account to pay off credit card debt? You’re making maybe 5% interest on your savings and paying probably 15% interest on the credit card debt. If you need cash in an emergency, you could get a cash advance from the credit card, but it seems to make sense to me to use whatever money you have to pay off the credit card–then start building savings.

I have to admit that my first thought on reading the sentence was that the New York Times wouldn’t say “just pay of the credit card debt first” because they run ads from the credit card companies. Or maybe my knowledge of personal finance is lacking.

(All of that said, I suppose the sentence is technically true.)

I think David Brooks really nails what has happened in the Democratic primaries with this editorial. I don’t agree that it necessarily happened in a “moment” at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, but maybe that evening crystalized it, and what he describes has, I believe, been a key dynamic of the campaign:

Clinton had sounded like a traditional executive, as someone who gathers the experts, forges a policy, fights the opposition, bears the burdens of power, negotiates the deal and, in crisis, makes the decision at 3 o’clock in the morning.

But Obama sounded like a cross between a social activist and a flannel-shirted software C.E.O. — as a nonhierarchical, collaborative leader who can inspire autonomous individuals to cooperate for the sake of common concerns.

We’ll see what happens today (I’ll find out when I wake up tomorrow morning).