Pomykala, assistant professor of economics at Towson University, began paving the way rhetorically in 1999 for the consumer bankruptcy laws that went into effect in 2005. The new consumer bankruptcy law substantially eliminated bankruptcy as an escape hatch for the middle-class, and even for the poor. Pomykala's article chronicled abuses of the law extant then, mainly by the upper-middle and upper-classes, and argued in favor of instituting tougher laws to prevent bankruptcy from being a financial panacea for individuals and a financial quagmire for businesses and for the sharing of the debt burden by everyone who has not declared bankruptcy.

             Pomykala's main argument is that, after literally centuries of draconian bankruptcy law in western society, including literally rending a debtor's body asunder under ancient Roman law (the origin of the phrase 'a pound of flesh'), today's consumer bankruptcy laws are far too lax, permitting debtors to run up enormous bills and escape from them, even if those same debtors have enormous incomes that could pay back the debt with the application of just a little good intention and belt tightening.

             Pomykala also cited the statistics for bankruptcies in the late 1990s. He noted that filing has surpassed 1,400,000 in 1998. Moreover, he lamented, this occurred despite the longest expansion of the economy in post-World War II history, and the lowest unemployment rate in almost 20 years. He notes that bankruptcy filings in 1998-1999 more than doubled the number of filings during the entire ten years of the Great Depression; what he fails to mention, however, is the increased population of the nation. While that would not explain all of the doubling, it would at least allow readers to compare apples and apples, rather than apples and oranges.

             He does not that the rate of increase in bankruptcies has been eight times that of population increase, and that amounted to a fifty-fold increase in bankruptcy in five decades.