The city of Phoenix is one of the cities with the most debt in the country, according to a new study.
Per a study from LendingTree, Phoenix ranks 18th among the 50 largest metropolitan cities for debts held. The average Phoenix resident has a debt surpassing $39,000. That’s higher than the average nonmortgage debt across all 50 of the country’s largest metropolitan cities (about $37,800).
The average Phoenix resident’s income amounts to $79,600 according to Census Bureau data, above the median household income for the rest of the country (over $75,100). The average Phoenix resident debt amount is nearly half of the city’s median income.
LendingTree retrieved its data using anonymized credit reports from around 210,000 users on their platform from April through June of this year across the 50 largest cities. Nonmortgage debt includes auto loans, student loans, credit cards, personal loans, and all other types of debt excluding mortgages.
Nearly 97 percent of consumers in Phoenix have nonmortage loan debts, per the study. That tracks with the debt averages for rest of the 50 most populated metros: on average, 97 percent of residents across all those cities have nonmortage debt.
45 percent of Phoenix residents also have auto loan debt, 85 percent have credit card debt, 24 percent have personal loan debt, and 24 percent have student loan debt.
Phoenix ranked even higher with its average auto loan debt, placing eleventh with the average auto loan debt sitting at nearly $14,000. That’s higher than the average auto loan debt for the state, which amounts to around $6,000. Auto loan debts accounted for the greatest portion of average debts held by Phoenix residents, which is also the case for 26 of the other 50 major metros included in the study.
Average credit card debt in Phoenix amounted to just over $8,200, average personal loan debt amounted to about $4,200, and average student loan debt amounted to over $10,300.
The average Phoenix resident’s credit card debt came out higher than the state’s: the average for all of Arizona amounts to over $6,300.
At the end of last year, Arizona ranked among the top ten states for the highest average unsecured personal loan debts: around $12,300. Arizona also ranked among the top 20 for highest average household debt increases from last year to this year: an increase of over $700, making total household debt in the state amount to over $429.6 billion.
The city’s student loan debt is lower than that of the state. As a whole, the state has an average student loan debt of nearly $35,700, with about 902,600 borrowers living in the state.
Phoenix was the only metro city from Arizona listed on the top-50 ranking by LendingTree.
The top three cities for debts held were all in Texas: Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, in order of highest to lowest.
The three cities with the lowest amounts of debt, in order from least to greatest, were: San Jose, California; Louisville, Kentucky; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Hard to believe it was just four years ago that President Joe Biden was elected with a promise to unite the country. After the misery of COVID-19 deaths and lockdowns and the riots in the streets of major cities, Americans wanted to be united by a unifying national purpose.
Alas, it never happened. Instead, Biden and his leftist allies were drunk with power and swerved the Democratic Party even further to the left. This alienated half the country, with a ruinous and unpopular progressive agenda on every issue, from running up massive debts to rampant inflation to transgenderism to electric vehicle mandates.
The country was only further torn asunder.
Can President-elect Donald Trump learn from these blunders and be the president who unifies the country by embracing traditional American ideals? The Make America Great Again agenda has some rough edges for sure, but if presented right, led by a message of hope, not malice, Trump can deliver an idealistic policy that the vast majority of Americans can embrace.
The way to do this is for Trump, as we approach our 250th birthday, to strike up the theme of a New American Patriotism. This should be a red-white-and-blue message centered around a renewed appreciation and celebration of American virtue and greatness. What better way to pull the country together? It should be an extension of the Reagan message of America being a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world.
Which we are.
For at least a generation and maybe two, our schools and our universities have denigrated America’s moral standing. We have been lectured that we should be ashamed of our nation’s past, not proud of our founding and our achievements of spreading freedom and free enterprise across the planet.
The hard left magnifies America’s failures — particularly slavery and segregation — not the magnitude of our successes and our virtue. Foreigners who visit the United States often can’t believe the extent to which our media, entertainment industry and intellectual class obsess over our moral failings.
Biden was particularly guilty of this, when he falsely accused the United States of being a systemically racist country.
Wrong, Joe.
A strong case can be made that America is today the world’s greatest and perhaps only multiracial success story. The melting pot isn’t just a history-book fantasy. It is real. The rapid increase in interracial and intercultural marriages is making racial distinctions almost obsolete. The rapid rise in incomes of Asians, Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Blacks should be celebrated.
Recent polling suggests that our citizens do appreciate American greatness. The only group that doesn’t is the ideologically isolated cultural and “highly educated” elite. The vast majority of Americans of every race and income category believe America is “the greatest country on Earth.” But many white liberal elites reject this notion.
Another example: White conservatives and Hispanics soundly reject the idea that America is systemically racist. According to Pew Research Center, “about six-in-ten Black adults say racism” is a problem in America today. But it is telling that many white liberals also believe this.
Is there still racism in America? Of course, yes. But it is not “systemic,” and the nation is becoming less racially polarized with every passing year.
America’s inventiveness, our innovation and our technological prowess, which propelled the world into the modern age and helped reduce poverty rates by 90%, are somehow sinister. Damn those fiends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Fortunately, these are views of a class of modern-day intellectuals who never produced anything but instead sow the seeds of miscontent and division. They certainly have the right to hold these blame-America-first ideals, but we don’t have to allow them in our classrooms to pollute the minds of our kids.
This is an extension of the Reagan metaphor of America as a “shining city on a hill” and a “beacon of freedom” for all the world. It’s truer today than ever before, and Trumpnomics will make it all the more true.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. His new book, coauthored with Arthur Laffer, is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) warned that the Biden administration’s economic policies have caused an unsustainable debt crisis and historic inflation.
This assessment was announced formally earlier this week by JEC Vice Chairman and Congressman for Arizona’s first district, David Schweikert, through the 160-page Republican Response to the Council of Economic Advisers’ 2024 Economic Report of the President.
Schweikert stated in a press release that 2024 serves as a “critical juncture” for the nation’s fiscal health, one that transcends political parties.
“The challenge before us is neither Republican nor Democrat — it is our moral obligation to ensure American families aren’t left behind. Congress holds the keys to determine which path we choose,” said Schweikert. “We can either behave like adults and choose the path of fiscal responsibility or continue our partisan gamesmanship that will put the American dream further out of reach for future generations.”
Schweikert said that the problems and proposed solutions put forth by the JEC report were inherently bipartisan, focusing on common-ground economy boosters like a healthier population and secure social safety net programs.
“Those of us on the Republican side, we built a report that offered actual moral, great economic solutions instead of the election year rhetoric.”
— Joint Economic Committee Republicans (@JECRepublicans) June 21, 2024
The JEC assessed that the Biden administration’s demand-side policies financed by increased borrowing have placed unsustainable pressure on constrained supply. As a result, JEC predicted that debt-to-GDP would grow from 99 percent to 116 percent by 2034, with interest costs rising. JEC noted that the labor force participation rates haven’t recovered to prepandemic levels; historic mortgage payments for new homebuyers, the highest in 30 years; constraints on budding American industries due to new restrictions on trade; and the cost of clean energy subsidies amounting to $1.2 trillion over 10 years, despite emissions from electricity production declining.
Further exacerbation of the economy comes from an aging population, declining fertility rates, and decreased prime-age labor force participation among men, per the JEC. The aging population is anticipated to drive Social Security spending to 6 percent of GDP by 2035, an increase from the present 5.2 percent and the 1970s at 3.1 percent, though no major expansions have occurred in over 20 years. The JEC reported that one in nine prime-age men remain out of the labor force; if just 25 percent of those entered, the economy would grow by $215 billion.
JEC disputed the Biden administration’s belief that increased taxes of wealthier individuals would amount to their desired revenue, a dwarfed amount of around 1.1 to 2 percent of GDP compared to future deficits. JEC stressed that only reduction in spending would improve fiscal consolidation.
Another demographic with an outsized impact on the economy, according to the JEC, is the rapid increase in obesity. Excess medical expenditures are anticipated to amount to over $9 trillion, as well as federal government spending of over $4 trillion within the next decade. Labor productivity and supply reductions impacted by obesity are projected to cost nearly $3 trillion and $12 trillion, respectively.
As for a positive solution to the nation’s current and looming fiscal woes, JEC indicated that artificial intelligence could grow the economy and improve government efficiency.
JEC also issued a lengthy assessment of the Congressional Budget Office’s revised budget and economic projections for the next decade. This included a $400 billion increase in projected FY2024 deficit, with about 80 percent of the increase coming from President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation failing to recover payments from 2023 bank failures quickly, new legislation, and higher than expected Medicaid outlays.
CBO recently released its updated budget and economic projections for 2024-2034 from the original forecast in February 2024. Below are some key takeaways from the revised estimates 🧵
— Joint Economic Committee Republicans (@JECRepublicans) June 19, 2024
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
In boasting about Bidenomics two weeks ago in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden declared that his policies are “restoring the American dream.” Then he went into his creepy whispering mode and assured us “it’s working.”
Huh?
Isn’t a big aspiration of the American dream owning a home? Biden keeps making first-time homeownership harder for young families for two reasons. One is that the overall jump in inflation and the slower increase in wages and salaries means that homes are more expensive. High home prices benefit those who already own their homes, but much of the increased value is due to general inflation, which reached a high of 9% last year and hurts everyone.
A bigger killer for first-time homebuyers has been the steady rise in mortgage rates under Biden. When he came into office, the mortgage rate was 2.9% nationally. Now it is 7.1%, thanks in no small part to the Federal Reserve’s 11 interest rate increases prompted by the $6 trillion Biden spending and borrowing spree in 2021 and 2022.
So now, according to the mortgage company Redfin, just the increase in interest rates on a 30-year mortgage from 5% to 7% means that a middle-income family that could once afford a median-value home of $500,000 can only afford a home worth $429,000. Great, spend more and you get less house. Or instead of a single-family home, you can only afford a three-room condo or a townhouse. If we compare the rates today versus when Donald Trump was president, the typical homebuyer can only afford a house with a price tag more than $100,000 less than three years ago.
What a deal? Maybe this is one reason the size of a new home is smaller than in the past.
Here’s another way to think about the damage done by Biden policies: If you want to buy a $500,000 home today, which is close to the median price in many desirable locations, your total interest payments will be at least $800 more per month. That means over three decades of payments totaling at least $250,000.
Of course, rents are up nearly 20% as well, so for many 20-somethings, this means sleeping in the parents’ basement.
Biden talks a lot about bridging gaps between rich and poor and blacks and whites. But the group that is most handicapped by these interest rate shocks is minorities. Black homeownership is still less than 50% for black households. The Washington Post calls this “heartbreaking,” but they blame racism, not bad government policies.
There’s one other impediment to homeownership for Generation X and millennials. Many 30- and 40-somethings are hamstrung by their existing and expanding debt. Credit card debt is now $1.03 trillion. Half of all families are expected to have problems paying off this debt each month. Delinquencies are rising, which can mean penalty rates of 20% to 25%.
So, if families can’t afford their existing debt, how will they get a bank to approve a $400,000 or more mortgage loan?
An even bigger question is how in the world can Biden call his economic policies a success?
Perhaps Biden has a secret plan to “forgive” trillions of dollars of mortgage debt, as he has already attempted to do with student loans. But that just shifts the debt burden to taxpayers — hardly a solution.
The Biden administration’s assault on homeownership isn’t just harmful to the families that are being priced out of the market. It’s bad for communities and cities around the country. When families become homeowners and set roots in a town, they are much more prone to care about not just improving their own house and maintaining the upkeep and mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges, but it gives them a stake in the schools and children in the neighborhood and the quality of the public services. In other words, homeownership gives Americans a sense of Tocquevillian civic pride.
Crime is lower, neighbors are friendlier and everyone’s property values rise when they live in a community of owners, not renters.
There is one reason to feel today’s downward spiral can be reversed. Back in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was president, mortgage rates weren’t 7%; they reached above 17%. Voters rebelled against the economic mayhem and chased Carter out of office. Ronald Reagan came into the White House, and with wiser economic fiscal policies, mortgage rates quickly fell in half and then lower still. It can happen again.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and chief economist at FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of the “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”
While the White House touts the success of “Bidenomics,” American families are drowning in debt, especially on credit cards. The latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show Americans ended the first half of this year with over a trillion dollars of credit card debt for the first time ever. At the same time, credit card interest rates are at record highs, pushing many Americans to the financial brink.
How we got here is a lesson in basic economics, something the Biden administration has willfully ignored.
Contrary to the White House talking points, President Joe Biden did not inherit a “reeling” economy and inflation was not “already there.” When he entered the Oval Office, the economy was growing at a $1.5 trillion annualized rate and inflation was 1.4 percent, comfortably below the Federal Reserve’s target inflation rate. But Bidenomics changed all that.
In just a year and a half, Mr. Biden managed to deliver two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth (a recession). Moreover, inflation reached 40-year highs, with prices rising in a single month about as fast as they rose in the entire year before Biden took office.
This is the bitter fruit of the Bidenomics tree. The seed was trillions of dollars in excessive government spending; it was watered with trillions of borrowed dollars and fertilized by the Fed’s printing trillions of dollars. The results are fast-growing prices, a sluggish economy, and family budgets getting squeezed.
Since Mr. Biden took office, prices have risen about 16 percent, but average hourly wages have risen less than 13 percent, and average weekly hours have been cut back. That has left the average American with an effective pay cut of about 5 percent, and families have been using credit cards to make up for that lost purchasing power.
In just two and a half years, outstanding credit card balances have exploded 34 percent, but it gets worse—much worse. The Fed has been steadily raising interest rates to combat the very inflation which it helped cause. That has pushed up borrowing costs, especially on credit cards; their average interest rate is now at an all-time high.
The combination of large balances and high interest rates is a financial death spiral for many American families. When the financing charges on your credit card bill are equal to or greater than what you can afford to pay each month, it becomes impossible to pay down your balance. You are effectively trapped in debt. On top of the higher cost of living, you’re now paying higher financing charges too.
And it’s not just credit card debt that has exploded during Bidenomics. Consumer spending during the last two years has been partly fueled by higher balances for auto loans and mortgages, the latter of which has grown almost $2 trillion in just two and a half years.
Mr. Biden’s false promises of a student loan bailout along with a moratorium on student loan payments have also encouraged young people to take on additional debt for schooling and not pay those loans back. In fact, instead of using the savings from the moratorium to responsibly pay down their debt, most borrowers have been further increasing consumer spending.
American families going deeper into debt is a hallmark of Bidenomics, so much so that even members of Mr. Biden’s administration are beginning to say the quiet part out loud. Vice President Kamala Harris recently claimed that most Americans would go “bankrupt” if they had a $400 emergency expense.
While there is no evidence to support Ms. Harris’ claim, her statement is an indictment of the administration’s economic agenda. For most Americans, a much more likely scenario than bankruptcy is that they would have to put that emergency expense on a credit card—which many families have already had to do.
The squeeze on Americans’ family budgets will continue until we clean up the federal budget. If Washington doesn’t cut trillions of dollars in spending, the bills will keep piling up, both at the Treasury, and in your mailbox.
E.J. Antoni is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
