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NEW BANKRUPTCY LEGISLATION HIGHLIGHTS NEED FOR A PEOPLE'S LEGISLATURE

Written by

Cat Winchester

10/2/02

By the time you read this, the new bankruptcy legislation that's currently pending in congress could already have become law.

Actually, it won't matter. The fact that it's being debated in the first place is all that you really need to know.

What the new legislation does is make it harder for people to wipe out their debt by declaring bankruptcy. The problem that I have with it is who the people are who are debating the issue as opposed to who the people are who are being debated about.

The average person in this country who declares bankruptcy only makes around $20,000 a year. By contrast, members of the House of Representatives, the ones doing the debating, just cleared the way for a $5,000 pay raise, the fourth year in a row that they've increased their pay. With the new raise, members of the House will now earn $155,000 a year, not counting all the benefits that go along with it.

Fifty percent of the bankruptcies in this country occur when people get sick and are then wiped out by medical bills, something you can bet your bottom dollar will never happen to members of congress. To me, this isn't just a national disgrace, it's one of the most serious, if not the most serious, problems facing this country. Yet instead of trying to deal with that situation what are members of congress trying to do? They're trying to conjure up ways to make it even harder to declare bankruptcy.

As a colleague of mine here would say, "does anyone detect a tinge of absurdity here?"

What members of congress should be doing is trying to conjure up ways to make it more difficult for people to find themselves on the brink of financial ruin in the first place. The fact that they're not doesn't surprise me. A congress that's made up of nothing but a bunch of rich, pampered, bowl-of-cherries, Cinderella babies will never, ever, ever put the interests of the average person on the priorities list. In fact, if anything, the new legislation is just another example of how members of congress are more interested in doing what's right for the special interest groups that wine them and dine them.The bankruptcy legislation has been heavily lobbied for by the credit industry.

I can't think of an issue that provides a better example of why this country is ready for the creation of something like the people's legislature that was first proposed by publisher Jesse Attreau.

Simply put, what Attreau proposes is the creation of a new legislative body that's made up of a cross section of the American public. Attreau suggests that the criteria used to determine the membership of the body be a person's total annual income, with the various income groups represented on the body by the same percentage that those groups take up in the general population. For instance, if twenty percent of the population made ten thousand dollars a year then twenty percent of the People's Legislature would be made up by people who make ten thousand dollars a year.

The People's Legislature would have equal power to the House of Representatives and the Senate. In otherwords, all three bodies would have to agree before anything could become law.

The logic for the People's Legislature is to insure that the average person has an equal voice at the highest levels of government, something that clearly is not the case today.

If people making $155,000 a year, who get a virtual automatic pay raise every year, sitting around trying to dream up ways to make it harder for people who are struggling just trying to make $20,000 to declare bankruptcy doesn't cry out for the creation of a people's legislature, what would?