My jaw just dropped when I read that people were able to write-off the interest that they paid on their credit-cards before as soon as 1986. Wow! After the debt-infused meltdown of the last few years on mortgages, the statement about credit-cards seems hard to even comprehend. I get a headache thinking about what would've happened had that law not been abolished?

Thank you, James Suroweicki, once again, for bringing something up that for some strange reason has not been brought up at all in this whole debate of the last couple years.