"The mindset of the left was recently displayed in a big, front-page story in the October 30th issue of the San Mateo County Times. It was an investigative reporter's expose of the "payday loan" business and its lobbyists. According to the reporter: "In California lenders charge up to $45 in fees on a maximum $300 loan. This amounts to an interest rate of 460 percent, trapping some borrowers into a never-ending cycle of debt."
The 460 percent figure comes from imagining that the borrower is not just going to borrow the money for a couple of weeks, but is going to keep on borrowing every couple of weeks all year long. Using this kind of reasoning -- or lack of reasoning -- you could quote the price of salmon as $15,000 a ton or say a hotel room rents for $36,000 a year, when no consumer buys a ton of salmon and few people stay in a hotel room all year. It is clever propaganda, but do people buy newspapers to be propagandized?"
And we don't know the payday loan 'victim's' circumstances. Perhaps not getting the payday loan will cause them to miss a card payment or bounce a check, costing more than the loan? The left assumes that everyone but them is irrational. They believe that despite no knowledge of an individual they understand what's 'good' for them more than they do. This is the evil concept of 'nudge' that has become the latest rallying cry of 'progressives' everywhere.
But it does give centralizing new class statists a lot more power, doesn't it? Isn't it funny how every progressive 'reform' does that?
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