Business letters

Nice story on bankruptcy. ("Personal debt is public’s problem," Consumer Confidential, Oct. 22.)

While Mr. Shelbourn is coping with excessive credit card debt and medical expenses, he faces an enormous problem in coping with his student loans.

Simply put, too many students, who are obviously quite young and naive when they start college, fail to measure their future economic potential versus the size of their future debt.

Higher education is very expensive, and just as expensive, in undergraduate years, for future teachers as it is for future doctors and future corporate lawyers.

They may leave school with the same debt, but the lawyer has a good shot at paying it off, the teacher doesn't.

I have seen school loan guidelines occasionally in the press, but not often enough. Students need to know that if they're looking at $40,000-a-year jobs, they probably can't afford $150,000 in loans and should plan their careers accordingly.

Maybe at some point, our country will get its priorities straight and fund higher education and develop healthcare financing to ease these problems, but I'm not holding my breath.

David Hurwitz

Calabasas

RETAIL

Signs of distress in U.S. economy

In your story, "Bad tidings in the retail realm" (Consumer Confidential, Oct. 19), you mention that many retail stores have closed. No kidding. Stores have been closing right and left all over the place, not only here in L.A. but in every city and town.

Why don't our brilliant economists take strolls into neighborhoods to see what is happening? This has been happening for a few years now. All they look at are figures in books and papers, but they are not aware of what is going on in Main Street.

Why didn't they notice that credit card debt reached $1 trillion several years ago?

Why didn't they notice that people were refinancing their homes to pay credit card debt over and over again?

Why didn't they notice that at major markets, such as furniture shows, attendance was dropping year after year?

I am a rep in the home furnishing industry and I knew something bad was going to happen, and that was four years ago. That's because I am out on the street.

Wallace Herman

Oak Park

Several years ago, a friend from Fresno told me enthusiastically about the housing developments that had replaced agricultural land, once the basis of the local economy.