re Payday Loans July 2, 2019 by Dr. Roger Ray
Twenty years ago, I was leading a tour of the Holy Land and Egypt with about two dozen church members. They were good, church going, middle class people from Springfield, MO. They wanted to visit the Garden of Gethsemane, the church of the Nativity, the church of the Holy Sepulcher and then to stand and gaze on the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphynx, which were already ancient when Moses had stood and gazed upon them as we did.
From there we made our way down to the Egyptian river city, Memphis, and we toured a carpet weaving factory. There were children sitting at giant looms as far as the eye could see. Our Egyptian guide told my church folks that giving the children jobs in the carpet factory provided both food for their families and it taught them a trade by which they could make a living for the rest of their lives.
This was the same propaganda used to defend child labor in the textile mills in New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia more than a hundred years ago. Long exposed lies that could no longer hide the exploitative abuse of child labor. Or so I thought. My good church folk walked straight into the gift shop and bought rugs and carpets for their comfortable homes in Springfield.
Once back on the bus, I asked them, “How could you? Didn’t you see all those hundreds of children?” And they said, “Without these jobs, their families would go hungry and the children would have no education or job training.” That is how it works.
Many of us can remember the days when the Americans with Disabilities Act began to be enforced regarding access to public buildings. I was in college in the mid-70’s when poorly conceived ramps were being hastily added to university buildings. Doorways were widened. Automatic doors were back fitted, and handicap accessible restroom accommodations began to appear. They all looked rather out of place and were often eyesores, breaking up the neat architectural lines of historic buildings. To the able bodied, they often seemed to be absurdly unnecessary and possibly even a wasteful expenditure.
If you are not a poor child in Egypt, the carpet industry doesn’t stand out as being uniquely abusive or unjust. If you are an 18-year-old runner, climbing a few flights of stairs to get to class is an unconscious exercise. Many matters of social justice never occur to us until they personally affect us. It is, arguably, a deficit of empathy in our culture but, honestly, no one can care about everything and we tend to conserve our emotional energy.
Slavery existed in America because it was legal. It was deemed to be a necessary part of the agricultural economy. Women were legally denied the vote because, well, there were believed to be too emotional to cast political votes. Blacks were kept from voting, not illegally but legally, because they were said to be too simple. Homosexuals were denied the right to marry one another, until recently, legally, because the majority judged their love to be vile, subhuman, and disgusting.
Exploitation is often legal, but it is never right. The poor are easy to exploit because they are often desperate. So, we have usury laws to protect them from predatory lenders but in Missouri there is a loop hole . . . a loop hole that has been closed federally so that it is illegal to make a high percentage loan to an active member of the military. Arkansas outlawed payday loan businesses altogether.
But in Missouri, a borrower can borrow at more than 200% and take out as many as 6 roll-over loans when they cannot repay the original loan, driving the interest rate up to the highest in this nation, 1950%. The businesses are often owned by church going folk who are generally thought of as leading citizens. They hide their ownership through out-of-state LLCs so that they can sit in church pews and even serve on the board of the Council of Churches and plausibly deny that they are becoming rich through immoral, wretched exploitation of the desperate poor.
The problem with many matters of social reform is that, until we personally are affected by it, we just don’t notice it. Currently there are about three million payday loans taken out in one of the 1200 locations in Missouri every year. Sure, some of the customers are drug addicts or compulsive gamblers (who are, in fact, people) but many are struggling to obtain much needed prescription medications, or just to keep the heat on in the winter. These are people who do not have savings to draw down. They do not have relatives or friends who can or will help them. In most cases, the payday or title loan doesn’t solve a problem but rather it exaggerates an existing problem and will become a larger problem than the crisis that brought them to take out the loan in the first place. This is a wretched exploitation of the poor even if it has no immediate impact on anyone who reads this publication. There are a million people within a day’s drive of you for whom payday loans are ruining their lives in the most violent ways in which poverty visits us in hunger, illness, homeless, and hopelessness.
3000 years ago, ancient Persian slaves came up with the idea of an unquenchable lake of fire into with the souls of the oppressors would be cast in the next life. I don’t believe that it is real, but there are times when it seems like it ought to be real, that there are people who are so evil, even if they are law abiding, that they deserve to burn forever.
But not just those who exploit the poor, but those who sit in seats of power and allow it. President John Kennedy once quoted Dante as having said that the “hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” I don’t know who fed John Kennedy a fake Dante quote, but, as with those ancient Persian slaves, the fact that the quote was falsely attributed doesn’t take away from the fact that it ought to be so.
Rather than increasing the fee for starting a payday loan business, which only cuts down on the competition for the richer predators among us, we should be capping all loans at 36% which is the protection federally afforded to our men and women in military service. The state legislature can do it and to not do it would be a clear indication of a morally depraved indifference or possibly even symbiosis.
Springfield has been my home for 28 years. I have published more articles about the Payday loan business than any other topic, as I have tried to prick the conscience of my adopted state. I have not made many friends in this Quixotic quest, but, I believe, even my most vociferous critics have always known that I am right about this.
What remains is for enough voters who have never and will never visit a Payday Loan office to decide that we will no longer tolerate this scourge to exist in our midst.