Not the rest, though...

My father's Sunday paper carries "Parade Magazine". This week they had a story (online) called "Red, White, and Scammed" by Earl Swift. It's about the various ways unscrupulous merchants as well as scam artists take advantage of and rip off service members. Car sales, life insurance, "cheap" computers ... there's a host of them, and always have been. Just drive past any army base and see.

But this really got me (my emphasis):

Washington has waged war against the scammers with limited success. When a 2006 Defense Department report cited payday lenders as a threat—rates for short-term loans had soared as high as 780%—Congress passed an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2007 that capped rates on such loans to military personnel at 36%. “Many payday-loan businesses stopped lending to service members,” Petraeus says, “because they said they couldn’t make a profit.”

The less principled, however, simply altered their tactics. Some lenders abide by the cap but drown their products in fees—in one reported case, $452 of charges were piled on a $1000 loan. Others base their businesses offshore and call their offerings “revolving lines of credit”—both so they can skirt U.S. laws and charge 500% interest. In her Arlington, Va., office, [Holly Petraeus, director of the military program of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and wife of Army Gen. David Petraeus] typed “ military loans” into Google. “I got about 2.5 million results from that,” she says. “A lot of them are predatory or just outright scams.”

So ... it's great that it's now illegal to charge more than 36% interest to military personnel. But it's still legal to charge 780% to civilians?

This is a huge part of why it's so hard to get out from under when you're poor. You have one bad month, and you have to borrow against next month's paycheck to meet this month's bills - because nobody will give you credit or an extension when you're that bad off. Problem is, you owe five or six times what you borrowed, so even if you get that loan paid off you need another one to meet that month's bills... And so it goes. Forever.

That kind of interest is way past usury. It's the most immoral way to make a profit that exists, barring only murder for hire.

It ought to be illegal to charge that much interest to anybody.