America's Favorite Pastime? Screwing Over The Poor

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | August 15, 2016 |

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | August 15, 2016 |

That headline might seem a little depressing or, since I was bold enough to acknowledge the poor, like I’m inciting class warfare. But don’t worry. It turns out that for specific areas of the financial industry, we all qualify as poor.

See? Don’t worry, those assholes who decided to crash the world economy a few years ago are trying to screw all of us! Again!

Of course we should be concerned that the bundling and selling, swapping and reselling of subprime car loans might have large negative effects on the economy. But we should also maybe check some of the math on the first half of that segment again. Because people absolutely love fucking over the poor. Remember the woman who had a stated $3,000 budget? And that asshole conned her into paying $13,000? That’s horrible, right? Only we as a society do that. All. The. Time. Let me explain.

The car loan itself seems wildly shitty, but the high interest on the loan is, in theory, justified. Assuming the buyer has a poor credit score, she represents a higher risk of default. The lender is taking a bigger risk, and therefore has to charge a higher fee. On a $3,000 loan at 25 percent she’d be paying $4,300. Seems justified. So where did the remaining $8,700 come from? The seller stole it from her. Because he could.

And so it goes with most areas of the lives of poor people. Being poor means that you don’t have a lot of things, and most of the things you have aren’t that nice. This is the sad, but understandable reality of not having money. But why do poor people also have less access to public transportation and therefore jobs, stores and resources? Why are schools in poor areas actually getting less than their fair share of funding and resources? Why are there several different industries set up exclusively to fuck over people who are already facing financial hardships? Because we fucking can.

The poor are marginalized, the marginalized make easy targets. And since we also shame the poor for being poor, most people don’t want to speak up about how badly they’ve been screwed over for being poor. And just like that, we’ve got a $3,000 car that costs $13,000.

But I don’t want to leave you on such a bitter note. Let’s take one more quick look at a company that’s happy to fuck over everyone (NSFW for lots of swearing and some light animated bestiality.)