New Orleans Refund anticipation loans or RALs, as they were known, were one of the most predatory products on the market in their heyday targeted solely to low-and-moderate income workers who were most desperate for their tax returns. They were on the other side of the digital divide so less likely to file with the …
Month: March 2017
Just When You Think It Can’t Get Worse, It Just Gets More Bizarre
New Orleans We’re living in bizarre times without easy explanations, making it hard not to start drawing straight lines in our mind about things that might normally have seemed simply examples of random events, but the examples abound. The legislature is meeting currently in Arkansas for instance. News reports indicated that there was a difficulty …
Getting Congress to Move: Get on the Blower and Hold that Line!
Little Rock Ever wondered what your representatives in Congress really listen to other than lobbyists, local business people, and of course their donors? Well, Kathryn Schulz in an informative piece in The New Yorker waded into the Washington swamp and came back with some interesting answers to that question. A lot of people might think …