Among evangelicals, Dave Ramsey is a popular personal finance figure. Renowned for his deep hostility towards credit cards, he strongly encourages people to destroy them and never rely on them. There is no danger, however, to a person's financial standing intrinsic in having a credit card, as I will address below, and I will also demonstrate that there are benefits to credit cards that far surpass those of cash. Denial of any of these things is routine for Dave Ramsey, who is guilty of what can be called the Ramsey fallacy, that of assuming credit cards are inherently or all but inherently an avenue to financial ruin. He is in error with other philosophical matters of Biblical theology and so on, but he is not as widely recognized for these ideas, with rejection of credit cards altogether being his most prominently advertised notion. As helpful as this measure could be for a very specific kind of person who is entrapped by credit card debt, he makes it as clear as he can that he is simply against buying things on credit cards at all.
Having a credit card does not mean a person will ever use it, as the latter thing does not logically follow by necessity from the former. Having a card available is different from actually putting it into use on any level. Using it, though, does not mean a person will buy anything they did not already plan to purchase, or that they will plan to buy something they do not need--not that this is by default a moral or pragmatic problem. Buying what one does not need does not have to entail going into gratuitous consumer debt as well. On these points, Dave Ramsey tends to leap fully into slippery slope fallacies, demonizing credit cards as if they are conscious entities exhibiting literal mind control over consumers. Moreover, he commits the fallacy of composition if he thinks that one person will overspend or wind up drowning in credit card debt just because someone else did/does. One person's actions do not have to mirror those of another!
If someone is going to buy a thing anyway, whether a need or a want--and it is not Biblically sinful to buy things you do not need as long as you are not buying anything immoral or neglecting what is obligatory, such as feeding one's child--credit cards also give them a monetary benefit that cash cannot in the form of cashback. This reward system can go beyond earning 1% of a purchase price in redeemable points. Ramsey has pointed out the very large amount of money that must be spent with the typical credit card to receive a comparatively tiny amount of cashback, but what Dave does not like to acknowledge is that while, yes, no one intelligent is going to spend 10,000 dollars just to get 200 dollars back (this would be at a 2% rate), credit cards still have an inherent financial advantage over physical currency since there is otherwise no money one gets back at all on any purchase.
There are other distinct ways credit cards are superior to cash in certain situations. With cash, you cannot pay for genuine emergency expenses ahead of time when there is not already money in an account for a debit card to draw from--or to withdraw in cash. On top of this, one must travel to and from a banking location to retrieve the cash, which adds unnecessary time and, ironically, expenditure of money for gas to the process of paying for something. Not all credit card spending and thus debt is the result of stupidity or lack of intentionality, and there will always be more effort involved in simply getting physical money ahead of time. Furthermore, cash can be lost due to forgetfulness or theft--it is never a victim's fault if they are robbed, no matter how much they did not conceal whatever they were carrying, but at least with credit cards, fraudulent purchases can be reported and cards can be shut down. Cash that is lost is probably lost forever.
I have never heard Dave Ramsey merely admit any of this, nor have I heard anyone else speak of him doing so. One can easily find his anti-credit card rants on the Internet, but it is also easy for a rationalist to refute his non sequitur fallacies concerning credit cards. Oh, he is logically and Biblically wrong on other matters too, yet none of them are necessarily as overtly emphasized in his presented monetary philosophy as eliminating not just credit card debt, but credit cards themselves. He opposes them even if they are paid off in full every month and reserved exclusively for necessities. Some people are deluded or fiscally dangerous enough to themselves to the point that they personally need to get rid of all credit cards. No one has to be if they only look to reason and self-control. Dave Ramsey, though, still speaks as if he is under the surface brimming with unbridled emotionalism on this subject in particular.
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