barbara ehrenreich...
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders,
have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark,
charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented
with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective
interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal
in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local
governments are discovering that they can partially make up for
declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on
indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving
with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to
make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number
of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.
[...]
You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the
amounts that are stolen, coerced, or extorted from the poor, but there
are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to turn
to independent investigators, like Kim Bobo, author of Wage Theft in America,
who estimates that wage theft nets employers at least $100 billion a
year and possibly twice that. As for the profits extracted by the
lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. -- How the Working Poor Became Big Business,
says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30 billion a year
for the financial products they consume and more than twice that if you
include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans, and subprime
mortgages.
[...]
I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on
the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken
seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one
should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no
chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take
precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or
strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor,
there are some things we need to stop doing to them.
it's shitty being poor... it's even shittier being poor and then being robbed of what little you have at every turn... Labels: Barbara Ehrenreich, payday lenders, poverty, predators, screw the poor, wage theft
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