Reason #49: Soaking the Poor

Even the less fortunate among us have to keep the economic pot boiling by living in the red. That’s why the folks in Washington allow bottom-feeding companies to invade poor communities and cash checks for sky-high fees or peddle so-called “payday loans.” Other “high-risk lenders” set up rent-to-own emporiums, where you can walk out the door with a big screen TV or leather sofa for little or no money down. Of course, by the time you pay off the astronomical interest rates, you could have bought four or five big screens.

Nowadays, though, it’s not just the check-cashing and rent-to-own vultures plundering the lower classes. The biggest, wealthiest corporations in the country have learned just how much money can be sponged out of poor Americans. Banks and credit card companies offer low- or zero-interest teaser rates that balloon into the 20 percent range after a few months. And the human dust cloths in the mortgage industry used those same bait-and-switch tactics to hook people into the gigantic subprime loans that we now see blowing up in buyers’ faces.

All this soaking of the poor might keep the economy chugging along, but mostly it’s making already-unhappy Americans even more miserable. It’s hard enough making minimum wage, working two or three jobs, and trying to raise children in the war zones that our inner cities have become. Now, lower-class Americans have the millstone of debt hanging around their necks. And while the bankers and businessmen who prey upon them are getting rich, the rest of us have to pay the costs: increased homelessness as people default on their mortgages, more crime as desperate citizens lose all hope, and a vicious cycle of womb-to-tomb poverty.

NEXT: Reason #50: The Uncrackable Tax Code