Predatory Lending to Low Income People

America has become a nation in which the low income people are considered a source of excessive interest and fees for financing organizations, mostly funded by large banks. The abusive lending practices include subprime loans of all kinds, including:
§ Subprime mortgages, second mortgages, and refinancing home loans
§ Subprime car loans
§ Payday Loans.
§ Overdraft loans
§ Abusive credit card fees and interest rates.
§ Rent-to-own contracts
§ Manufactured housing loans.
§ Tax refund anticipation loans
§ Check cashing fees
§ Pawnshop loans

This is a set of websites that describes a lot of the predatory lending practices that have grown during the last decade or so. As you look at these, think about who has paid for the recent bill that makes bankruptcies more difficult to get and more expensive.

Here are some resources.

The Center for Responsible Lending offers the following source: A Resource for Predatory Lending Opponents . This is from their website: ”Predatory lending strips billions in wealth from low-income consumers and communities in the U.S. each year. Borrowers lose an estimated $9.1 billion annually due to predatory mortgages; $3.4 billion from payday loans; and $3.5 billion in other lending abuses, such as overdraft loans, excessive credit card debt, and tax refund loans.”

The AARP presents this guide to avoiding predatory lenders:
Avoid Predatory Lenders.

The Mortgage Bankers Association presents its Predatory Lending Resource Center

The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) offers its website Housing Predatory Lending.

The congressional Government Accounting Office (GAO) presents a report on predatory lending Consumer Protection: Federal and State Agencies Face Challenges in Combating Predatory Lending. A PDF file.

The American Bankers Association provides a website Avoiding Predatory Lending Scams.

ACORN’s report on predatory lending in subprime loans by Wells Fargo Bank Runaway Stagecoach: Wells Fargo’s Predatory Lending.

A related method of soaking the poor is shown in the Texas Report on Lottery demographics Why Tax the Rich When You Can Soak the Poor? Remember that the lottery is another institution that has the sole purpose of sucking the money from low-income people, just as the predatory lending techniques above do.

Consider all of this in the context of the US Tax system as described in Perfectly Legal: The Secret Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else by David Cay Johnston.

America may still be the land of opportunity, but the gauntlet a person has to run to make and save money is getting longer and harder to get through. Most of the problem is the failure of government to act for the public. It has been coopted by the predatory lenders and the other predatory people in this nation so that instead of setting fair rules and enforcing them, the philosophy has become one of making each person responsible for protecting themselves at all times, and the government is now there to collect the penalties from the losers.