It’s time for this country to have a serious conversation about debt.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that homeowners with perfectly good credit scores, affordable homes and affluent incomes are “strategically defaulting” on their mortgages at rates unpredicted and unpredictable by any available financial information.

What this means is that homeowners, who can easily afford their debts, are just walking away from them at astounding rates and without notice. This casts a different light on the nation’s foreclosure crisis, which has largely focused on impoverished homeowners captured by unaffordable, predatory loans.

Those are still a problem, of course. But the notion that foreclosure is not an unfortunate end, but rather a means to an end, is new and unaddressed. The national credit bureau Experian commanded a study of this behavior, and found it happens more often that we’d have thought.

And, incredibly, twice as often as the housing industry thinks it happens — almost 600,000 times alone in 2008, according to its analysis. (In Maine, new state data says foreclosures are increasing at modest rates, but this is only a snapshot of activity. The state only watches Maine-based lenders.)

How many of these might be “strategic defaults” is unknown. What is apparent, however, is this strategy controverts the entire principle of indebtedness, and indicates the punishment for failing to make good on debts are far too weak, or have become watered down.

This could be the end result of our bailout culture, in which those responsible for creating and amassing incredible financial liabilities — such as investment banks, automakers, whoever — have not suffered the consequences for their actions. For all intents and purposes, these entities have gotten away with it.

Not totally, of course, but in principle. These high-profile examples of escaping their fate have apparently permeated down to otherwise respectable homeowners. If they can get away with it, the internal argument might go, so can I. Why should I pay, when they do not?

Yes, this is pure supposition. It’s not unreasonable. Parents try to teach their children that every bad action has its consequences, for example. What happens when this basic premise is violated, and the threat of punishment is removed from the equation?

There used to be debtor’s prisons, for example — a strong incentive to pay. Now, the threat is to credit and one’s future ability to borrow. So the punishment for strategic default is a slightly lesser chance of doing the same thing again?

Nothing good, we think. Which is why we need, as a nation, to talk about debt. Debt is an obligation to be met, not a regulation to be skirted. If we are operating under the assumption that debt shall never be paid, or doesn’t need to paid, or can be ditched, something is wrong.

The buck must stop somewhere.
Right?

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