BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Bobert
Date: 22 May 12 - 08:56 PM

Pay day lending = Million % APR

Sales taxes = 30% on the poor's income

User fees, all those fees on electric bills = regressive

Who says the poor doesn't pay???

F'n rip off...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: GUEST,mark-s(on the road)
Date: 22 May 12 - 08:47 PM

And worst of all, the poorer classes have a lower life expectancy than those who are well off. Meaning that if you - poor person - die before retirement age, any money you might have paid into Social Security just goes bye - bye, and you incur no Medicare costs if you do die before reaching an older age.

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: YorkshireYankee
Date: 22 May 12 - 08:30 PM

And of course that's how it's worked with our (the US's) healthcare as well...

AFAIC, any country where people without jobs and/or money are expected to pay 2 to 8 times (8 is a guess; for all I know it could well be higher) more for their medical treatment/drugs than people with jobs/money simply cannot consider itself truly civilised. Seems to me the folks without jobs/money end up subsidising the medical care of those who do... now is that the wrong way round or what?

And the hoops that even people with jobs/insurance/money have to jump through -- and the runaround they get when they try to get the insurance to pay out... is also incredibly unfair; people who are poor/unemployed/less educated/seriously ill often are so busy just trying to survive, they have even less time/patience/knowledge/energy/wherewithal to persist in the effort to be paid back by the insurance companies than well-off, better-educated folks.

I'm praying ObamaCare will help alleviate some of these injustices -- IF it manages to survive all the negative (and often misleading and/or completely untrue) PR it gets...

"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
One thing the bible got right (sadly)!

That's 'cos the rich get to make the rules...

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Rapparee
Date: 21 May 12 - 09:16 AM

Idaho Falls is 50 miles away (just about exactly so). If I were to go there to shop I would use (roughly) four gallons of gas. A round trip would cost about USD 15.00. So I order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble online -- as do many who use the public computers at the Library.

And you can't avoid using a credit card. Many places no longer take checks and carrying a wad of cash around is asking for it. Debit cards require either money in the bank or pre-pay (with cash).

So you eat lots of cheap, fatty hamburger and cheap margarine on day-old white bread, become obese, and end up contributing to the cost of health care and funerals.

Been there, know that. Grew up that way; got lucky.

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 21 May 12 - 02:57 AM

And then there are the discounts to the fortunate who can afford to pay for things like road tax in one annual sum.
Those who struggle to find the money have to pay more.

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 21 May 12 - 02:54 AM

Since I got my bus pass, I use buses a lot.
My fellow passengers are all over 60s like me, or poor.

No-one who could afford a car would go by bus without a pass.
The fare is far highere than the combined cost of fuel and parking.
They know the poor have no alternative.

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 May 12 - 01:21 AM

Yup. It's an old story, but it seems to be getting a lot worse lately.

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: Bobert
Date: 20 May 12 - 10:42 PM

Look at sales taxes... They can be as high as 30% of their income for the poor... Very regressive... But no one talks about that...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: wysiwyg
Date: 20 May 12 - 10:35 PM

Anyone raised poor has lived this. How nice to see it boiled down to a thread title. ;~)

~Raised Poor

Subject: BS: How Govt & Corp's Use Poor as Piggybanks
From: YorkshireYankee
Date: 20 May 12 - 10:06 PM

A very thought-provoking and dismaying (not to mention appalling!) article here:
Preying on the Poor: How Government & Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Here's the first section (about a third of the full article):

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.

The poster case for government persecution of the down-and-out would have to be Edwina Nowlin, a homeless Michigan woman who was jailed in 2009 for failing to pay $104 a month to cover the room-and-board charges for her 16-year-old son's incarceration. When she received a back paycheck, she thought it would allow her to pay for her son's jail stay. Instead, it was confiscated and applied to the cost of her own incarceration.

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Sometimes it's hard to be hopeful...