No one is talking about letting them starve. I agree it is society’s responsibility to provide basic food and shelter to anyone who can’t provide those things for themselves.
I just don’t want to hear them whining about how hard it is to afford a fucking $1,500 sofa. These people are a long way from starving. They just don’t have access to the luxury goods they want without making stupid financial decisions. Cry me a river.
Let’s forget about people actually dying, i.e. starving. As a society, we always want to provide people with the opportunity to improve their situation, and letting people kill themselves through their own bad decisions is too harsh a punishment (incidentally, that’s also an argument for drug prohibition). However, I would argue that letting people suffer through the financial hardship produced by their own laziness and irresponsibility is definitely good for society, because it provides an incentive to not be lazy and irresponsible.
That is a false dichotomy though because they aren’t going to starve (the wife could benefit from skipping more than a few meals apparently). No one in that situation is literally starving in the U.S. They have a roof over their heads, food, water and even at least one vehicle. That is luxury in many parts of the world. What they don’t have is as many luxury goods as they want just like 99% of all people.
The reason it is an immoral and bad idea to give people that display behavior like theirs isn’t to teach them a lesson. It is so that you don’t encourage that behavior further and you don’t take and waste other people’s money on a hopeless bleeding heart quest. I seriously doubt you can change their behavior fundamentally no matter what you do. People that screwed up in so many ways hardly ever learn and turn everything around.
Their problem isn’t lack of money at all. That is just a symptom of many deeper problems and the inability to manage basic life skills in even the most basic ways. If you think just buying them a nice couch would be a harmless gesture, just wait until they use the money that someone else is giving them to take out another loan for 30x as much to build a swimming pool or buy a new boat. Now they are in a much deeper hole and it really is your fault this time. That isn’t a hypothetical threat. It is more common than not for people that come into any significant amount of wealth or income that they didn’t earn. It is also the same reason you shouldn’t throw out steak scraps every day for that poor stray dog in your neighborhood. Pretty soon, you have a pack of dogs that act like they are going to starve if you don’t provide all of their food (and it better be the good stuff or they will rip your apart if the supply ever stops).
And before anyone brings up the bank bailouts, I was against them in principle, too. I was less than certain that it was the best policy, but I certainly felt that if we needed, as a society, to bail out these banks, then the folks who ran them should pay dearly.
The issue here isn’t lack of access to sofas, it’s lack of access to banking services and predatory quasi-banks exploiting loopholes so that they can provide financial services without the responsibilities and protections the middle class has given itself. .
But you know, if rent-a-centers operating as unregulated banks gets you one step closer to your libertarian fantasy, you are going to be all for it. One thing I’ll never learn is that you can’t have a conversation with a zealot.
Please see post 200, and tell me how that makes me a zealot? You guys say there is a problem. Answer my 4 questions and walk us through the solution. I’d love to have a conversation with you on this, but you don’t seem to be willing to tell us what you think needs to be done and why.
Oh go pass a law against these centers. Call it the People Too Dumb to Buy the $250 sofa at Big Lots Protection Act. I’m a liberal Dem and I’ll support it. But don’t patronize or infantilze people by pretending there aren’t other options other than sitting on the floor, buying a bug infested garage sale sofa or paying over 4k for a $1,500 couch.
I can get behind this. There’s a fine line between understanding someone’s moronic behavior and excusing it. Knowing that it’s much, much harder for some people to get credit, or to rent a truck, to take time off of work to go to Ikea than it is for a middle close bloke like myself is one thing. I respect the fact that a lot of the decisions that I make without a second thought are impossible for people in a different socio-economic bracket. But at the same time, moronic decisions need to be discouraged, and the people who make them rightly chastised.
The problem is poor people staying poor. Poverty affects everyone, in the form of lost tax revenue and higher taxes. Poor people are less likely to have well educated children who grow up to be productive members of society. Often in poor communities, businesses peddling high interest loans are rampant, exploiting basic loopholes in human psychology to take money from people who don’t really have any. While some people do benefit from the availability of loans to people with bad or no credit, on the whole these businesses do a greater harm to society than the limited benefits they provide. Part of the solution can be to outlaw such businesses with narrowly tailored laws at the lowest (local) level to regulate certain business models (rent to own, payday lenders) or businesses that provide loans with outrageous interest rates.
I don’t think there needs to be a federal law banning rent-to-own places, nor do I think we need to get into all kinds of ridiculous slippery slope arguments. If our narrowly tailored local law accidentally ensnares some other, more legitimate businesses, we can change the law. No big deal. That’s my main objection to the libertarian principle arguments in this thread – we have businesses that are hurting society right now, but we shouldn’t pass laws regulating their behavior because they might hurt hypothetical businesses at some point in the future? That seems a bit silly.
OK, so answer my 4 questions. And I didn’t say anything about hypothetical businesses in the future. There are countless numbers of places that rent shit out and that don’t fall in the "Buddy’s category. Make sure your new law doesn’t fuck them over.
I answered all 4 of your questions to the best of my ability in that post. I’m a software engineer, not a social worker or a lawyer.
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
[QUOTE=me]
The problem is poor people staying poor. Poverty affects everyone, in the form of lost tax revenue and higher taxes. Poor people are less likely to have well educated children who grow up to be productive members of society.
[/QUOTE]
What is the size and scope of this problem?
[QUOTE=me]
Often in poor communities, businesses peddling high interest loans are rampant, exploiting basic loopholes in human psychology to take money from people who don’t really have any.
[/QUOTE]
What is the proposed solution?
[QUOTE=me]
Part of the solution can be to outlaw such businesses with narrowly tailored laws at the lowest (local) level to regulate certain business models (rent to own, payday lenders) or businesses that provide loans with outrageous interest rates.
[/QUOTE]
What negative consequences does the solution cause?
[QUOTE=me]
While some people do benefit from the availability of loans to people with bad or no credit,
[/QUOTE]
That’s really the best I can do without a shitload of research and maybe a law degree or a crash course in regulatory legislation. But really, I attempted to answer your 4 questions in that post, as you can see.
OK, appreciate the effort. No insult intended, and maybe we do need some lawyers to check in, but your analysis of the scope of the problem and your proposed solution are too fuzzy for me to sign on to.
The business provides a service, pays its employees, and contributes to the economy as a whole. It is clearly meeting a demand that would exist even if the business did not. When high interest credit cards and fees were prohibited through Dodd-Frank, it simply drove consumer demand for credit to other sources.
Not quite. Outlawing the rent to own or payday lender type businesses hurt them right now as well. They employ people. Those people will be out of work, and the consumer will be unable to obtain credit or will obtain it in less optimal ways. To think you can completely control demand by restricting supply is silly. It can be influenced sure, but I’m not seeing as how we are better off.
Obviously it contributes. The statement I was challenging–which has since been withdrawn–was the notion that a substantial driver of overall poverty is reckless spending. That part isn’t true. The majority of poor folks are not middle class folks who spent themselves into poverty. That’s just not how it works, and the suggestion that this is how it works fundamentally misunderstands the problem and potential solutions for it.
It’s psychologically convenient to tell yourself that poor people are poor because they make bad financial decisions. But it isn’t really true. To say nothing of social and cultural factors outside of individual control, even self-discipline is probably subject to the same genetic lottery as so many other traits that affect earning power. The folk Protestant idea that hard work is solely a function of (and measure of) personal righteousness is about as outdated as the Bible’s view on whether whales are fish. In a hundred years, bragging about how hard working you are will probably look a lot like bragging about how tall you are, or how attractive you are.
I don’t believe you, but I suspect it will just be quibbling over what “substantial” means.
Again, I don’t believe you. Here we have a pretty clear example of someone who is going to be poor partly at least because she is really bad at handling money and will not delay gratification. That’s not why she’s poor; it’s why she is going to stay poor.
It isn’t true if you limit it just to financial decisions. If you extend it to making bad decisions in general, it is.
I have posted this a dozen times, so don’t bother asking for a cite again. A poor person in the US who
[ul]Graduates from high school.
[li]Does not have children he or she cannot support without government assistance, or outside marriage.[/li][li]Gets married and stays married.[/li][li]Gets a job, any job, sticks with it for at least a year, and does not quit it before securing another job[/ul]and can manage this for five years, at the end has a better than 90% chance of not being poor. None of these acts are outside the capability of the average person in the US. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Lower margins vis a vis other businesses does not indicate lack of over charging. Over charging itself is ill defined.
The assumption by **steronz **is specifically, ‘on the whole these businesses do a greater harm to society than the limited benefits they provide.’
That is a dubious claim unless there is some force involved in the transaction, or one of the parties is incapable of making caring for themselves.
Ultimately support for eliminating these types of businesses is an example of arrogance. ‘We know what’s better for you than you do, so we will not let you make these choices’. Combine that with ‘We don’t approve of your business so we will shut you down’.
Do you know the number one source of conflict in marriage? Money. You think more poor people have failed marriages because poor people lack virtue. The truth is that more poor people have failed marriages because poor people lack money.
But there’s not really any point in having a debate with someone who believes in a supernatural explanation for poverty. If your view is that poor people have more tiny devils in their heads, or whatever, then more power to you. Hopefully policymakers will try to come up with more earthly explanations and solutions.
Very few character traits are not subject to the “genetic lottery”. Having a predisposition to murder, pedophilia etc. are just as likely to be subject to the same “genetic lottery”. Thems the breaks. The genetic lottery is real, and there are winners and losers.
That doesn’t mean you can entirely do away with the concept of right and wrong.
What’s even more important is that even with the constraints of the genetic lottery, there is still room for individual effort to affect outcomes (in all these areas). And to the extent that society rewards effort in these areas and punishes lack of effort it has a positive effect, and to the extent that it treats all equally it incents people to do what they want and fall back on “genetic lottery” excuses. Bad idea.
I don’t have any problem with the premise that social and legal structures change behaviors, and we should build them to incent the right behaviors. I do have a problem with the belief that the poor are unvirtuous and therefore there is no need to consider and reconsider our social and legal structures to try to have fewer poor people.
And I think it is good if we are very specific about the factors inside and outside the control of poor people, and how we are encouraging or discouraging certain decisions. Throwing up our hands and saying “bad decisions,” and then grouping in a bunch of stuff like length of marriage that is also an outcome rather than cause of poverty, will not lead us to success.