The Intolerable Life Cycle of Debt and Death

For most Americans, Christmas and capitalism go together like cookies and milk. This symbiosis can be acknowledged explicitly or ironically, subtly or with celebration—but the underlying message is always that happiness is attached to material goods. The acquisitive urge reaches its irritating apotheosis in the classic A Christmas Story, but I want to talk about the not-actually-subtle accusatory nihilism of that other holiday film many conservatives hold holy: It’s a Wonderful Life, which is of course about how financial hardship leads to suicide, and how capitalism is the apex predator of every community.

The FBI clocked this when the film was first released, whereupon the agency submitted a report to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC ultimately declined to call Frank Capra to testify. Still, the FBI had reason to be alarmed. George Bailey is something of a tragic inverse of Luigi Mangione: a man so crushed by economic pressures he considers assassinating himself.

In case you’ve forgotten the oft-sped-over specific circumstance behind Bailey’s presence at the edge of the Bedford Falls bridge, here’s a review. He’s about to jump because he owes Mr. Potter $8,000. Economists tend to champion the movie as a tale about how banks and savings and loan operations run. However, the movie’s moral engine starts because American capitalism has taught Bailey (and those of us in the audience) that that debt is literally a fate worse than death.

We can count on neither the state nor private businesses to keep our families housed and clothed. Bailey does the simple math and decides what is completely true on paper: He is worth more dead than alive and would rather be dead than a (perceived) burden to those he cares about the most. You only have to consider it for a moment to see the ugliness in the movie’s disinterest in elaborating on Bailey’s thinking. Bailey doesn’t have to explain why ending his life is a logical response to his situation; we should be appalled by how intuitively this is to understand.

The movie’s happy ending depends entirely on the idea that a community can step in when the system fails. This resolution warms the heart only in the way that successful medical GoFundMes are heartwarming, temporarily and superficially. (It doesn’t help that the movie ultimately lets the villainous Potter off the hook; in 1986, Saturday Night Live provided a far more satisfying ending in the form of the people of Bedford Falls lynching Bailey’s bête noire.)

The underlying forces that make people desperate for such charity—and which makes the sugary poison of the “feel-good feel-bad story” possible—shouldn’t exist in the first place. In a just society, Bailey wouldn’t have had to worry that his family would suffer just because he couldn’t pay off what he owed.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of art that would disappear if we lived in a world with a better social safety net—Breaking Bad couldn’t have come out of Canada, as many observed—but I would be willing to make the trade.

About 8,000 Americans each year make the same decision as Bailey, only without a guardian angel like Clarence to stay their hand, which is to say that some 16 percent of completed suicides in the United States occur in response to to a financial problem. Now, poverty kills people in a thousand different ways: Poor people are at higher risk for mental and physical health issues. They are at a higher risk of death due to intimate partner violence as well as gun violence (the two, needless to say, are not mutually exclusive). They are more likely to die as victims of homicide and as military casualties. They are more likely to be denied an insurance claim.

Yet debt is strangely equal opportunity. One study found that problem debt almost doubled the odds for considering suicide even controlling for age, gender, employment, and experience of traumatic events. Debt obviously drives people into the poverty that we’ve already established as a killer; that debt can inspire suicide even before the class slippage simply speaks to how thoroughly we’ve internalized the core tenet of neoliberalism: Everyone for themselves and woe (and humiliation) unto those who cannot take care of themselves.

As Mangione has captured international imagination as an avatar of the universality of our hatred of for-profit health care, so too can we see debt-related suicide as something bigger than a problem for poor people. It is a problem for everyone but the very, very wealthy. The top 1 percent can owe millions of dollars and go bankrupt all the time without incurring judgment or any personal psychic distress. Our conception of consumer debt as a moral failing, coupled with the belief that individuals are those ultimately responsible for their own well-being, literally kills people.

A study in the United Kingdom found that even controlling for preexisting mental illness and socioeconomic factors, suicidal ideation was twice as common among adults less than 55 years old who had “[d]ifficulty in making hire purchase or mail order repayments and paying off credit card debt, in addition to housing-related debt (rent and mortgage arrears).” A study in Australia found that in 12 percent of those with suicidal ideations who went on to make an attempt, “employment status was the only significant predictor.”

That debt-related suicide isn’t confined to the poor has an ironic good news/bad news twist: We don’t have to completely eliminate poverty. You don’t have to completely rebuild the health care system, either. Create more and stronger laws against predatory credit card interest rates and other extortionary loans. Enforce (or improve) existing standards around the collection of medical debt.

These solutions are not utopian desires; over half the states in the union have laws that limit people’s exposure to debt collection, losing their home, and being charged junk fees or extreme APR. Here’s a rundown of what states can do and have already done about medical debt. Here’s a state-by-state comparison on limiting APRs. You’ll not be shocked to find that some red states have no limit on interest rates. You may be genuinely surprised that even purple and blue states can be timid: Virginia allows 129 percent APR on six-month installment loans; Colorado’s cap is 91.

Or consider a solution that has already been put forward and slapped down by the situationally “pro-life” party: forgiving student loans.

A 2021 mental health survey indicated that one in 14 borrowers experienced suicidal ideation in response to the financial stress of student loans. Among borrowers who were unemployed or earning less than $50,000 per year, this rate jumped to one in eight.

The solution is so simple, it’s disgusting. If Biden’s student loan forgiveness program had been allowed to stand, it could have broken the sickening straight line between student loans and suicide and suicidal thoughts with the stroke of a pen.

I guess such measures could also save the lives of credit card executives and hospital board members, too.

One could be forgiven for choosing to ignore the distressing honesty of It’s a Wonderful Life or the even more omnipresent reminders of Christmas consumerism’s true cost: More and more online retailers offer some form of Christmas layaway plans. Others get aggressive with pitching in-store credit cards. One survey found that half of Americans are still paying off their holiday spending from 2023; last year, it was just 25 percent still on the hook for whatever passed as 2022’s Red Ryder B.B. gun (which would cost about $100 today).

Contrary to popular belief (and George Bailey’s plight), suicides do not peak at this time of year; I wonder if that might have to do with this availability of easy credit. Folks are pushing the cause of their pain down the line. Suicides actually peak in the spring; data since 1880 shows increases between 20 and 60 percent.

No one is sure why. An increase in sunlight might make people more likely to act on the idea. Maybe a lack of social pressure eases the tension between sadness and putting on a happy face. Perhaps people simply sleep more? One scientist sincerely put forth postnasal drip as a factor—which sounds silly, but there’s a link between rhinitis and depression as well as tree pollen and suicides among women, so, sure. No wrong answers in a crisis, and it is a crisis we’re in. Suicides in the U.S. are at a record high.

Allow me to forward a hypothesis, admittedly all vibes: Springtime is tax time, the time of the year when we’re reminded of how much we make and how much we owe. Conservatives have demonized tax season as a demonstration of how much the government takes from us, but it’s just as easily a reminder of how little any of us get back. The fear that we won’t be taken care of could be the easiest problem for a government to solve. Hell, Trump may have won the election by simply promising this thing.

Research from the University of Boulder early this year sounded a warning about what that looks like today: State-level financial indicators (stagnating wages, high unemployment, increased poverty) strongly paralleled increasing suicide rates. “Suicide hotline crisis numbers and efforts to help people at the individual level are all amazing and necessary, but our work shows that higher-level, institutional interventions are also critical in addressing this crisis,” said the study’s lead author. “Giving a person a job or proper health care can also be a suicide-prevention tool.”

Such small boons would seem less miraculous than the appearance of a guardian angel, though in this hard-hearted climate both options sound like fantasies to me.