Cartoon of the Day: "We Pronounce It Usur-ah"
Last year, after yet another Missouri legislative session came and went without decreasing the interest rates that payday loan companies can charge their clients, a group of religious and civic organizations filed a state ballot initiative to bring sanity to the marketplace.
Missouri is one of the nation's most powerful magnets for payday loan companies. Its notoriously weak laws allow profiteers to prey on the working poor by charging effective annual interest rates of up 1,980 percent.
The payday loan companies and their cousins in the consumer credit industry want to keep that gravy train running on time.
They've created two campaign committees with hundreds of thousands of dollars — most of it given secretly — to fight off a ballot measure that is nearly identical to the one Congress passed to limit the ability of payday loan companies to bankrupt our nation's servicemen and women.
The payday loan companies don't want Missourians to have those same federal protections. And they won't even tell you that face to face.
