Nick Hanauer - Job Creator Myth

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Originally Posted by RedskinRat

More information along the same lines:

Barbara Ehrenreich, Looting the Lives of the Poor


Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

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.

I think I can see where this is going.

Yea, the poor make poor decisions and it cost them money. They always have (thats why they are poor in most cases) and always will but the left never wants to blame them (their voting block) for their bad decisions. I see it everday and you just want to shake them and tell them to stop doing stupid stuff. I'd say my bottom 20% of low income customers have more trafic violations then the other 80% of customers. Then they cannot understand why their insurance is so expensive.