idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Except you missed the part where I said I also agreed with the legislation, because predatory lending was a serious issue that this legislation HAS solved.
I didn't miss that part. Hence the whole "met your own petard" bit. You agree with a piece of legislation which was passed to prevent predatory lending. But the consequence of doing that is that all lending will become more restrictive (because risk and rate are directly related).
Quote:
My problem isn't the inability of students to get easy lines of credit, its the inability for them to build a credit history. Cards shouldn't be the only way to manage that for young adults.
They're not. Buy a car and pay it off. That'll do amazing things for your credit rating. Buy appliances/furniture on payment plans. Pay them off. Any method of borrowing which is successfully repaid will result in an improved credit rating. The problem is that most of that kind of borrowing isn't possible unless you already have a positive credit history or can show sufficient income. My point is that this isn't a new problem. Credit cards have been the easy way to get around it for a long time, but it required that those young people just starting out with their first credit card actually be responsible and use them wisely. But of course, some didn't, and they got into a pickle, and Obama decided that he would save them from that danger by basically making it so credit card companies wont give them cards anymore.
Kind of a stupid solution, but there you have it. The net result is that the "fast and easy" way to build credit has been taken away (mostly). So now you have to do it the old fashioned way: Get a job. Earn enough money that someone will give you a loan. Pay off loan. That's how people used to build up a credit history. We've just gotten used to the availability of high rate credit to high risk consumers as a way for those who could handle it to build credit earlier in their lives. Why be surprised that when you pass a law which prevents the high rates, you also prevent lending to high risk consumers?
Quote:
And the fact that school systems have been rapidly shedding programs like home econ because of no child left behind is a much larger issue for my generation. My high school didn't even have home econ, shop, etc. Short of computer-based classes, essentially all electives minus art and band were ones that would have a strong correlation with skills that would train students for test taking.
/shrug. There are a host of reasons for why programs like home ec have largely been canned. Most likely the lack of any groups lobbying for such classes is part of the problem.
Quote:
You don't get to stack the cards against you and then be outraged when they fall.
And yet, you support a law that stacked the deck against you, and are now outraged at the result. So...?
Quote:
Comprehensive education and lower regulations, less comprehensive education and much higher regulations. I'd LOVE for comprehensive education to be the name of the game. But it hasn't been the left blocking those efforts for years.
"Comprehensive education" is a buzzphrase. It means nothing. More correctly, it means whatever the semi-random political conditions of the moment say it means. You simply can't teach everything to everyone. The problem is that as we add things that the current political environment insists must be part of a "comprehensive education", you have to remove something else that used to be taught. Education actually is somewhat of a zero sum game in that respect. So the problem isn't that we don't have comprehensive education, but that the comprehensive education we have today doesn't have some things that you (and I for that matter) think it should.