will probably happen not too long after it begins to reward consumers and penalize contributors. If you live in a democracy, it becomes your responsibility to police this.

Some warning signs from my country:

Bailouts. When those companies who are reckless in their consumption of money (both theirs and other’s) and get “bailed out”/rewarded with more money from taxpayers, it can’t be a good sign.
When they tell you to do your part by spending money. I’ll never forget when I watched President George W. Bush ask Americans to go out and spend money. It was a blatant appeal to consumerism.
When governmental departments are penalized for spending less (and thus contributing back) than they had budgeted by having their budget reduced the next year. Consume it all and it gets replenished the following year.
When the tax code rewards consumption. If someone uses a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to go out and buy something consumable, they get tax relief. This basically amounts to the government trying to encourage you to convert your non-liquid, non-flexible assets into liquid flexible assets. The hope is that you will spend the money which in turn will help …

I have the opportunity to stand before leaders all over the world and talk about what God’s word says about money. One of the most potent topics that always creates lively discussion is debt.

While never calling debt sin, God does puts some boundaries in place. Our discussion usually centers around these three:

Don’t Presume upon the Future
Have Collateral You Can Afford to Lose (with more value than the loan)
Be Committed to Pay It Back

Lately I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about what role the abuse of debt played in the US housing crisis. It’s interesting how each of these were mismanaged and broken in the years leading up to the housing crisis.

Don’t Presume upon the Future

None of us can guarantee our next breath, let alone the long-term plans we’ve made. When we go into debt, we should have a clear plan for taking care of it in the event of our death, or illness. We should not make present day commitments based only on future revenue.

Home buyers violated this principle in mass in my country. They were told that although their payments …