Just to add to the Amen Corner at slacktivist: Laser-guided Red-lining.
Here’s another article on an issue that burns me up. Auto insurers are using customers’ credit ratings as a factor in pricing their insurance. The upshot — poor people pay more than rich people do. (See this earlier post.)
As James Baldwin says, "It’s expensive bein’ poor." And it’s not just auto insurance. More and more, credit rating is being used for all kinds of things other than extending credit. And in every case, what it means is that people with low credit scores (i.e., the poor) are charged more for the same services than people with high credit scores (i.e., the wealthy). This is ass-backwards, unjust, illogical.
Add to that, the requirement in some (all?) states that a driver have insurance in order register one’s car. Insurance is expensive, and getting more so. Increase the expense pointedly for those who already have financial problems, you make it nearly impossible for them to have insurance at all; thus making car ownership an illegal act.
Whoa. I feel really paranoid now. That must be the real reason I stayed away from blogging all this time – the paranoia.
EDIT: I didn’t realize it sounded as though I was advocating uninsured driving. I’m not. I’m just harping upon business & government practices which seem to pointedly affect the poor above and beyond the middle and upper income folks. Requiring proof of liability insurance to register your car seems quite reasonable. But if you can’t afford insurance, you don’t get to register your car. If you don’t register your car, you can’t drive it legally. But if you still need to go to work, and you live in a town that has limited or poor public transportation (the case in much of California, for example), you’re screwed. The poorer you are, the more each fee and requirement hurts, because it’s coming out of your already threadbare pocket – AND your options are so limited, you might be willing to ride the lightning. Here’s a solution that takes us back to Fred’s point: don’t use credit ratings as a factor in auto insurance costs. That would lower insurance costs for many of us and certainly increase the feasability of mandatory auto insurance. As it is, we’re at the mercy of an industry that we cannot simply bypass. The market does not control pricing: whether insurance costs are low or high, we still have to pay.
