Posted on 04/28/2005 5:23:38 AM PDT by FlyLow
It says it right there on our license plates:
Arkansas — The Natural State
And in the Natural State, poor suckers make natural prey. Like too many other Southern states, the Natural State is a loan shark's paradise.
You may have heard of payday lenders. You can find them in almost any poor neighborhood. These financial predators will gladly advance you money on your paycheck at an unconscionable rate of interest. Sometimes it's as high as 300 percent a year, sometimes higher.
Surprisingly, the small print says nothing about a pound of flesh, but the effect can be almost as devastating.
Once a sucker is hooked by these payday lenders, it can become a way of life, like any other addiction.
Tennessee Ernie Ford, who owed his soul to the company store, had no idea how rapacious the mod, souped-up, chain-store equivalent could be. In state after state. There's a reason so many payday lenders are found in poor neighborhoods or just outside military bases, where some of the more responsible commanders have marked them Off Limits to their personnel.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Just don't do it.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
The going rate was $5 at any time during a 2-week pay period, with $7 due on payday. We knew it was a ripoff, but if you needed a few bucks to hit the beach on liberty, it worked for the short-term.
Here you pay about 17 dollars per 100.00 of a loan. If a person was to write 3 checks totally a hundred bucks that happened to bounce they would be looking at at least 90 dollars in fees to the bank plus the amount of the check and sometimes a check is ran thru twice and charged for both times.
You can find yourself into some serious debt there. I'd prefer to borrow the hundred, pay the 17 dollar fee and be done with it.
Well, looks like we still have Northern carpetbaggers down here abusing Southerners.
>They are still cheaper than the banks 30 dollar per check >insufficient funds charges.
Not if you do it right. I mean you go bouncing 20 checks made out for $50 bucks a piece, yeah, you're getting ripped. So you just right one big check, close to your overdrawn limit and you have one $30 charge.
Jeez, you got to be smart when you are in dire straights and finageling finances.
(From an ex-welfare mom)
I'm sure Southerners don't need any help. We have the same bunch with the same M.O., home-grown, right here in Missouri.
Is their any reason WHY this is strictly a Southern *shame*?
Why the South? There's no clear answer.
Maybe the problem is their being sophisticated about economics but not about sociological reality here south of Mason-Dixon's.
(translation...we're too stupid to realize we're being ripped off, yet he says we know 'economics' (money)? What the heck is *sociological reality*, anyway?
The explanation is cultural: Payday lending and refund loans are the natural successors to the worst of the sharecropper system in a regional culture that, before tenant farming, was rooted in plain slavery.
(yep..it's all because of the eeeevil slave owners!)
States that don't regulate the terms of loans at all, like Wisconsin and New Mexico,
(So it's NOT all in the South?)
Nothing like a Northern bigot taking a cheap shot at Southern history to make an attention grabbing headline!
GAG
Personally I'd say the "Shame of the South" was Jimmy Carter, but hey, that's just me...
Anything south of New York is what the author imagines as the "South."
ROFL!
Ain't that the truth!
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