Origins...

My apologies if this has been done already. I'd hate to hear "It's a Ziggy."

Return of the son of the loan shark

I am about to defend a bunch of real assholes -- no not in government, in the private sector. But sometimes you have to do it. You sometimes have to defend the porn theaters, Klansmen and Nazis in order to protect free speech. In the same regard, you have to protect the pawn shops, payday loans and credit card companies in order to protect a free economy.

Don't tune out just yet. I am well aware these guys are the ugly underbelly of the financial world. I am well aware that they charge outrageous interest rates. I am well aware that often it is the poor and uneducated that get caught up in all this -- though I can surely say I've seen more than my share of college educated middle class folks driving their Lexus and sipping a caramel macchiato while they stuff their big wad of credit card receipts into their Coach handbag.

The fact is: like it or not these companies provide a service by providing (often unsecured) risky loans to people that want them. And while none of us outside the legal profession probably read the 8 pages of fine print reduced to the size of a 3x5 card for easy storage, we pretty much know what the deal is. We get something, we pay more later. And I will argue and argue and argue and argue until I turn blue in the face that this is an irrational way of going through life, but just like I don't want to outlaw your church, I don't want to outlaw risky credit.

But that's just what House Resolution 1608 and Senate Bill 500 propose to do. They would cap interest rates at a pretty gosh darn freakin high rate of 36%. But think for a moment: what would that do? Obviously rates above 36% exist, or they wouldn't even be discussing this. Obviously there is a demand for loans at that rate. So illogically, let's cut the supply, shall we?

I'd like to point out here... again... what happened with the housing industry. Oh, there was lots of stuff that went on. (Read this for a detailed, annotated history.) But the gist of it is: in a lovely human gesture to save the poor and less educated, the government encouraged, cajoled and sometimes forced loans to be made at interest rates below market value. Result? Calamity. Housing and banking will take years to recover and the folks that were being "helped" are now in worse shape than they ever were.

I'm not saying that closing a few pawn shops will crash the economy further. What I am saying is that the more you restrict the risky credit, the less options are available to exactly the segment of the population you are trying to help. We are already seeing banks retracting credit and reducing credit limits. This is for their own protection. They've been overextended for a long time now. They're trying to fix themselves. Restricting this will only prolong their agony or ensure their failure.

And when you move the "fair" credit to the pawn and payday loan market, the results are much more ominous. If you think these guys are scum, think for a minute what they're going to do if you don't pay: wreck your credit, pester the living crap out of you, sell your hocked power tools and make you miserable. The alternative lending sources for the same segment of the population is going to be Uncle Vito. He's more likely to burn down your house, threaten your kids or break your kneecaps. (Oooh, a good excuse for universal health care!)

In short, the left will do to finance what the right would like to do to abortion and mind altering drugs. This sort of short sighted law does not squelch demand. It just makes it riskier for the supplier -- creating higher dangers for everyone. This bill isn't about protecting consumers from unreasonable credit rates. This bill is about launching the careers of a bunch of new loan sharks.

Suze Oh-Man!

This is really a geek rant, but before I get off on that bit... when the hell did Suze Orman go all soft? She used to be a hard ass, tell-you-what-you-need-to-hear chick. Now she's all "poor you. It's the economy." This is the same chick that ranted and raved when folks bought more house than they could afford and leveraged it with some god awful interest only loan.... Now she's feeling all sorry for those folks. But like I said. This is a geek rant.

So its "Green Week" this week and Suze has all these ever so helpful tips from her viewers -- how to save money and save the planet. One viewer calls in and says she is teaching her child to be green by turning off all the lights for one hour every day. And low and behold, she's saving $40 a month by doing just that! That's awesome. That's terrific. That's great. That's also a big load of crap.

Let's just take a look at this, shall we?

• $40 a month savings by turning off the lights for one hour a day
• that boils down to $1.33 a day
• assuming $0.1202 per kWh (which is what I pay, and our rates are known to be a little high)
• that means 11.0026 KWh savings a day (or 332.78 KWh a month)

Holy frickin moly. That's a lot of lights burning in an hour. Consider a standard CFL with 100w equivalent burns 25w. (She's saving the planet, remember, she MUST be running CFLs.)

Given one bulb for an hour is 25 w/h and she is saving 11,002.6 w/h -- she is turning off 440 lights. If you're burning 440 lights at in your house at any given time, your problem isn't with lighting. She's either full of crap, has a house the size of Home Depot or she's got a marijuana farm in the basement and she's turning off the grow lights.

Teabagging, post script

[This is a post script to Teabagging. If you're reading this top down, you might want to read that first.]

Wow. I just read Janeane Garofalo's rant on tea party supporters:

"It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they'll believe it, except the truth."

Oh Janeane. I had such a crush on you. Why do you have to end it with us this way? So, the logic goes "if you disagree with a black man, you hate black men." According to this logic, I disagree with Hilary Clinton. I hate all women. Oh, and let's throw "carpetbagging Yankees" in there as well to stir up trouble. I disagree with George Bush. I hate all white men. I did not much care for Alberto Gonzales, thus I obviously hate all Hispanics. I really detest and fully disagree with Kim Jong Il and I guess that means I hate all Asians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really sets me off sometimes, showing, I am sure, my pure unfettered display of unilateral hate of all Muslims and Middle Easterners. I have never found a love of the taste whale blubber, which obviously shows contempt for the Inuits. I've never spent any time reading Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip drivel and obviously this is my latent homosexuality showing which creates my internal strife and makes me violent towards all gays and lesbians.

If there was divisive, bile spitting, prejudiced hatred with no rational thought going on, I assure you it was in categorically crying "racism" over "disagreement." The truth is that if someone can have a peaceful disagreement over the policies made when a black man was in the white house -- that alone is a positive sign of the changing times.

Teabagging

First off, I must admit: I am a coffee drinker. Tea doesn't do it for me. That said, I like the whole tea party concept -- but I think it missed the boat. I think it was ignored. And I think I know why.

First off, it got no media coverage. Oh, sure, Fox News was there -- and almost seemed to be a sponsor. This probably drove the other media outlets away. Who wants to be seen covering someone else's event? Some will see this as the "awful liberal media" but I don't see it -- at least not at the moment. And I don't care if Fox was the only one covering you -- this is not a benefit. Fox News is divisive. Sure there may be a handful of pundits on Fox that occasionally spout a rational point of view, but they are so buried in over dramatization, fear promotion and pandering to the religious right that it gets lost in the shuffle. And the right so doesn't understand they are getting hoaxed -- that Fox News is a lefty's joke to make money off the right and funnel it to the left.

And, oh my god, shut Rick Perry up. I understand his message. And the right person can say it in a way that is a little more balanced. But this is Texas. And in Texas there is something extra special about the whole "Secede from the Union" thing. In Texas, there is a whole subculture of crazies that preach secession all the time. They don't need anyone pushing them. In Texas, secession brings out the confederate flag waving, monster truck driving, hood wearing lynch mob. These folks don't need a push. They are scary enough without the Gov standing up and giving them a shout out. Take your Rod Blagojevich hair and go back to the governor's mansion.

But most importantly, if this movement were to be effective, there needs to be a very loud criticism of the right. Yes, I said the right. We all know that the tea party folks hate the insane spending of the left. But they need to embrace the insanity of the spending of the right as well. Don't you sit there and defend Bush and criticize Obama when their spending and bailout plans are pretty much explicitly the same. Bush and Clinton got us into this mess with their idiotic financial policies. Obama's plan to get us out is right in line with the plans that got us here. To criticize one without bashing the other is a farce.

This needs to not be a left vs right or liberal vs conservative issue. This needs to be a reason vs irrationality issue. And it needs to be loud. And it can't just be something we do on "tax day." The protest needs to happen until the idiots in Washington step down. Right now, they're not even scared. Right now, the tea parties have been dismissed and ignored.