Payday loans, those places where you are able to borrow money from shady outfits with nothing for collateral but your paycheck, should be banned by local communities, or made illegal by state or federal law, because they contribute to crime and drug abuse and offer nothing positive in return.
The reason these establishments are allowed to exist is because they say that they are helping the poor families who sometimes have difficulty making it from one check to the next; the problem with this claim is that it isn’t true. Of course it’s true that many poor families have difficulty making it from one paycheck to the next; what is not true is that payday loans help them. The reason that is not true is because taking out payday loans winds up costing those poor families money; money which they obviously need for living, but instead pay as interest on payday loans.
Payday loans and their cousins, those lowlife businesses that will loan you money if you hand over the title to your car, exist for no other reason than to prey on people that have fallen on hard times.
Consider for yourself what you would do if you found yourself unable to get to work because your car needed a repair that you could not afford. So you headed over to the loan shark to get some money, but now you owe him money that you may not be able to repay, so you lose your next paycheck or your car; neither of which is going to help you out at all.
Or, what would you do if you found yourself addicted to alcohol or crack cocaine, but still were barely hanging on to your job? What would you do if you could just hand over your car title or your paycheck and get the money you need to buy all the stuff you want; you’d take it right, and the future be damned.
This is why these places need to be shut down; because they prey off of people that can’t say no to the enticing offer, and then find themselves worse off. This leads to higher unemployment as these people eventually lose their jobs; and higher crime rates as they find they can’t get new employment without a car. It leads to loss of self-control and self esteem and people turning to drug use that wouldn’t have done so before.
In short, it leads to a whole host of problems that could be alleviated with one swift vote in a state or federal legislature. It’s time for that to happen, because too many futures are being thrown away.