“What payday lending reflects is the fact that the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck,” said Donald C. Lampe, a partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, who advises payday lenders.
.. The median income of payday loan borrowers was just over $22,400 a year, according to an analysis of roughly 15 million payday loans by the consumer bureau, leaving many struggling. Nearly 70 percent of borrowers use the loans to cover basic expenses, with only 16 percent tapping the loans for emergencies, the Pew Charitable Trust found.
..The bureau found that during a 12-month period, borrowers took out a median of 10 loans. Borrowers paid median fees of $458. The median amount borrowed was $350. And more than 80 percent of loans were rolled over or renewed within two weeks.
.. Also expected under the rules are limits on the number of times that lenders can gain access to a borrower’s checking account.
The poorer parents are, the less they talk with their children.
In the nineteen-eighties, two child psychologists at the University of Kansas, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, began comparing, in detail, how parents of different social classes talked with their children.
.. But the researchers also found that the wealthier parents consistently talked more with their kids. Among the professional families, the average number of words that children heard in an hour was twenty-one hundred and fifty; among the working-class families, it was twelve hundred and fifty; among the welfare families, it was six hundred and twenty. Over time, these daily differences had major consequences, Hart and Risley concluded: “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies were growing and the higher the children’s I.Q. test scores at age 3 and later.”
Martin Luther King Jr: A Riot is the language of the unheard
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” King, a great champion of nonviolence, wasn’t advocating rioting, but rather honoring hearing.
Does Moving Poor People Work?
The results are striking. The low-income minority children from public housing all started with similar math scores. But after seven years, those who went to schools where fewer than 20 percent of their classmates were poor shot ahead of those who went to schools where 20 to 80 percent of their classmates were poor.
.. Fryer and Levitt argue that the elimination of “the test score gap that arises by the end of junior high school may be a critical component of reducing racial wage inequality.”