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Alexandria Ocasoi-Cortez - Needs her own thread.....


swordfish

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Tucker Carlson and AOC Are Wrong About Christianity and Usury: https://mises.org/wire/tucker-carlson-and-aoc-are-wrong-about-christianity-and-usury

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Recently the nominally conservative, but increasingly populist firebrand Tucker Carlson joined self-proclaimed socialists Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders in calling for a federally-imposed 15 percent cap on interest rates. In a livestream video introducing their new bill, the Loan Shark Prevention Act , the two legislators lashed out against credit card companies and the payday loan industry for engaging in “predatory” behavior.

“[T]hey are absolutely, indisputably right,” Carlson declared on his Fox News show. But the measure is not a uniquely progressive idea, Carlson was quick to note. Bans on “excessive” interest rates, otherwise known as “usury,” have been in place throughout human history. “There’s a reason why the world’s great religions condemn usury...High interest rates exploit the weak,” Carlson asserted.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez joined Carlson in citing religious admonitions against lending at interest. She naively and bizarrely attempted to catch Christians in their alleged hypocrisy, tweeting, “Usury - aka high interest - happens to be explicitly denounced in the Bible...Looking forward to having the religious right uphold their principles + sign onto my bill.”

While Carlson and Ocasio-Cortez are technically correct when they claim that Christians have condemned usury in the past, they have left out the other half of the story. It was primarily Christian thinkers, working within new market-based paradigms, who demonstrated that the collection of interest was not actually sinful and, what’s more, that its prohibition was economically irrational.

.....

Few if any modern Christians would oppose lending at interest. In spite of her direct (and disingenuous) appeal to Scripture, most Christians recognize that AOC’s strictly literalist interpretation of Biblical teachings on usury is sorely lacking. A more nuanced perspective would reveal that these passages condemn lending at interest only to the destitute. Loans were made to people who were likely well-acquainted with each other. The Old Testament authors did not and could not anticipate the complicated and multifarious financial services which have developed over the past several centuries. And what they could not know about, they could not denounce. As Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin write , the Biblical admonitions against usury “had lost their force because the general terms in which they were expressed could hardly cover the multiple kinds of transactions that passed for ‘loans.’”

Even then, not every Biblical passage on usury denounces the practice. In the aforementioned “Parable of the Talents,” Christ likens the judgment of God to a man who goes on a journey and entrusts his property to his three servants. Two of his servants increase their shares, earning a profit for their master. The third, however, buries his share in the ground. The master is furious and tells the unproductive servant: “Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.” Jesus was, of course, not giving an economics lesson here; but it would be strange indeed if He were to compare God to a man who profits on usury if it were an immoral activity.

That being said, many Christians would probably agree that unusually high-priced loans to those in severe financial distress should still be considered morally suspect, and arguably evil if one consciously took advantage of the poor by charging an exorbitant amount of interest, especially to a friend, relative, or coworker. But if there is a uniform rate, applied to any debtor under any and all circumstances, above which all accrued interest is “excessive?” Is it 15 percent, as Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Carlson believe? Even those who generally support price ceilings would admit that it would be ridiculous to apply the same maximum price to a diverse set of goods and services, so why should we expect financial products to all be similarly priced? Are all loans priced above 15 percent automatically “exploitative”?

At the Council of Trent in 1554, Father Juan Polanco recognized the complexity of the issue: “t is extremely difficult to detect when...injustice takes place in commercial dealings…[T]he matter, being a question of morals, only admits of probability, because its nature is such that the least change of circumstances renders it necessary to revise one’s judgment of the whole affair.”

To impose a cap on interest rates, without any reference to the complex and varied financial arrangements individuals find themselves operating within, is consistent with neither Scriptural teachings nor with the past three-hundred years of Christian theology.

 

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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-growing-cauliflower-colonial

“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It’s so important,” she said as she filmed a community garden in the Bronx.

“So that’s really how you do it right. That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context, and it’s an area that we get the most pushback on because people say, ‘Why do you need to do that? That’s too hard.’”

She went on to add that growing cauliflower in such gardens is a “colonial approach” and the reason communities of color oppose environmentalist movements.

“But when you really think about it -- when someone says that it’s ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows Yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something -- what you’re doing is you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“That is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them.”

 

So, OK......Racism in community gardening.......I mean, after her statement, the conversation gets even more blubbering.......You can't make this up.......

 

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36 minutes ago, swordfish said:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-growing-cauliflower-colonial

“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It’s so important,” she said as she filmed a community garden in the Bronx.

“So that’s really how you do it right. That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context, and it’s an area that we get the most pushback on because people say, ‘Why do you need to do that? That’s too hard.’”

She went on to add that growing cauliflower in such gardens is a “colonial approach” and the reason communities of color oppose environmentalist movements.

“But when you really think about it -- when someone says that it’s ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows Yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something -- what you’re doing is you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“That is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them.”

 

So, OK......Racism in community gardening.......I mean, after her statement, the conversation gets even more blubbering.......You can't make this up.......

 

Clearly you can and do make things up.

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Perhaps she doesn't realize there have been tornadoes in DC before........

https://ijr.com/aoc-weather-vs-climate-blaming-casual-tornadoes-climate-crisis/

https://nypost.com/2019/05/24/ocasio-cortez-shares-panicked-reaction-to-dc-tornado-warning-on-instagram/

“The climate crisis is real y’all,” Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that “we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country.”

 

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10 hours ago, gonzoron said:

Speaking of the free market:

Fresno Grizzlies lose more sponsors in aftermath of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez video

https://sports.yahoo.com/fresno-grizzlies-lose-more-sponsors-in-aftermath-of-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-video-203128823.html

I found this line in the article to be interesting ... albeit maybe because it wasn't written well:

Per the investigation detailed in the Post, an employee pulled the incorrect version of a video the employee had been using for years. It was not fully watched before it aired.

Something doesn't make sense in that and also there's something else going on with the various denials.  AOC has only been around in the national spotlight since around the start of the year and this is the first Memorial Day since her rise as "an enemy of the people.".  How many videos have been cut with her in them like this for the Grizzlies?  I would expect just the one.  If it is the "incorrect version" why it is sitting around in the production bins?  It's not like it's a video of a hall of famer that shows every year on their induction anniversary and it's been twenty years since they've been inducted so there are several versions of it lying around that have actually been played in production.   Similarly, someone had to have made that video and someone else had to have reviewed it to have deemed it as inappropriate/incorrect, so it's not like this snuck up on them.  Also, what would have led them to consider it incorrect?  What'd they do?  Misspell her name in the last one so they weren't going to use THAT one?  More likely, it was deemed incorrect for the exact reason that we are seeing now.  Seems like another one of those "plausible denial" situations where the trial balloon can be floated and then either raised to higher heights if it works or quickly dismissed off on a low-level employee to deflect consequences if it doesn't.

 

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  Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez Declare War on the Poor With Anti-Credit-Card Law: https://mises.org/power-market/bernie-and-ocasio-cortez-declare-war-poor-anti-credit-card-law

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Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled sweeping new legislation on Thursday that would impose a federal cap of 15% on credit-card interest rates.

The bill would also allow state governments to set interest-rate ceilings even lower than the federal mandate.

Naturally, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are framing the bill as something designed to help "ordinary people." But in reality, the legislation will only act as to reduce access to credit for low-income and other high-risk borrowers.

Credit card companies don't attach high interest rates to credit cards because they are mean and cruel. Credit cards with especially high interest are that way because the borrowers have been determined to be an especially high credit risk. Credit card companies want people to borrow money from them, so if they can make loans at lower rates, they will, in order to undercut the competition. But these companies also must make sure they're likely to cover their costs. Thus, the high interest rate exists to ensure the lender can make consumer loans while still accounting for the high risk of default by borrowers based on a risk profile.

Given that interest rates are similar to a "price of money," if Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez manage to slap a new limit on credit card interest rates, they will be essentially imposing a price ceiling on credit cards.

And price ceilings are sure to lead to shortages.

That is, they'll lead to shortages in consumer credit for high risk borrowers — many of whom will be low-income borrowers.

If lenders cannot price their product in a way that allows them to recover costs, they'll simply stop providing that service. Rather than face lower interest rates on credit cards — as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez imagine will happen — high-risk borrowers are more likely to not be able to borrow using credit cards at all. Given that default rates are generally higher for low-income borrowers, the cost of collecting payments is higher. Lending to high-risk groups then is only possible if the price of those loans is higher. Without the higher price, the service will go away.

Cutting Poor People Off — "For Their Own Good"

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly what Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez want. One way to claim to have "done something" about high levels of debt is to simply cut off potential borrowers from credit.

After all, there is an implicit paternalism in efforts to place roadblocks between low-income/high-risk consumers and the products those consumers may wish to purchase. In the minds of a government planner, the solution to the problem of people borrowing "too much" money is to pass a law preventing them from doing so.

This, of course, is inherently unfair to those people who are — for now — in the high risk category, but who do pay their bills most of the time. (They might simply be in their category because they are young and have never established much of a credit history.) Moreover, many people who missed payment in the past may now be much more reliable and less prone to default. As people who fit a certain high-risk profile at first, they're likely to face high rates. One of the best ways these people can build good credit, though, is to first gain access to credit at high interest rates. Over time, they will increasingly gain more access to credit on better terms. Should these people then be punished and cut off from credit because they can't qualify for more moderate interest rates right away? The effect of the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez legislation would be to do exactly that.

Meanwhile, lenders who offer loans to high-risk groups are themselves being blamed for the proliferation of credit card debt among American consumers of all types.

In his essay on payday lending — an issue very similar to that of high-interest credit cards — Tom Lehman analyzes the accuracy of these sorts of claims:

[T]he allegation that payday lending "causes" chronic or habitual borrowing may ignore the old adage that "correlation does not equal causation." As indicated above, it is a well-known fact that payday loans appeal to a clientele that face numerous financial difficulties (many of them self-induced), quite independent of the payday lending industry itself. Most of these households have failed to establish good credit, have poor credit histories, are not known for their timely bill-paying habits, frequently bounce checks, frequently change jobs, and may relocate often. In short, they are the type of people who are going to be frequently short of cash and who will borrow "chronically" when given the opportunity. Because payday lending institutions provide them with this opportunity to borrow when other institutions will not does not mean that payday lenders cause this behavior. They simply provide an opportunity for this behavior to be exhibited more often than otherwise.

As is so typical of politicians, the answer offered by this new legislation is to limit the options available to the most at-risk populations.

A better approach is to allow freedom for both borrowers and lenders, to treat borrowers like adults, and to not assume they are incapable of managing their own money.

Treating individuals like adults is not the purview of progressives like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.   To them most Americans are children who need the adults in government to tell them what they can and cannot do.   This law in a slap in the face of individuals freedoms and responsibility.

 

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4 hours ago, Muda69 said:

  Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez Declare War on the Poor With Anti-Credit-Card Law: https://mises.org/power-market/bernie-and-ocasio-cortez-declare-war-poor-anti-credit-card-law

Treating individuals like adults is not the purview of progressives like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.   To them most Americans are children who need the adults in government to tell them what they can and cannot do.   This law in a slap in the face of individuals freedoms and responsibility.

 

What do you think of usury, Muda?

On 6/3/2019 at 12:56 PM, TrojanDad said:

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Except for the working class.

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35 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

What do you think of usury, Muda?

What do I think?  Nothing.  Caveat Emptor.  Nobody is forcing an individual to take out that loan at the particular interest rate.   After all usury is just the lending of money with an interest charge for its use. 

Years ago I had to use the services of a payday lender for several months.  I made sure to pay back the entire balance by the due date, so I was only out the $20-25 (can't remember exactly how much).  I knew the consequences of "rolling over" the existing loan into a new one.  

 

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Ocasio-Cortez, Who Makes $174,000, Wants $4,500 Raise: ‘It’s Not Even Like A Raise’: https://www.dailywire.com/news/48269/ocasio-cortez-wants-4500-raise-its-not-even-raise-ryan-saavedra

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Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) whined on Monday about the possibility that she may not get a $4,500 pay raise — which she downplayed as only being a cost of living adjustment — as she compared members of Congress to minimum wage workers.

Fox News' Gregg Re reported that there has not been a cost of living adjustment for members of Congress for the past nine years and that Democrats in vulnerable states are worried about how a $4,500 pay increase will look during the next election.

Fox News' Chad Pergram caught up with Ocasio-Cortez — who makes $174,000 per year —on Monday and asked her about the possibility that Congress would not get the pay raise.

...

"You know, it may not be politically popular to say, but honestly, this is why there's so much pressure to turn to lobbying firms and to cash in on members service after people leave because, because precisely of this issue," Ocasio-Cortez said. "So it may be politically convenient and it may make you look good in the short term for saying, 'oh, we're not voting for pay increases,' but we should be fighting for pay increases for every American worker. We should be fighting for a $15 minimum wage pegged to inflation so that everybody in the United States with a salary, with a wage gets a cost of living increase."

"Members of Congress, retail workers, everybody should get cost of living increases to accommodate for the changes in our economy and then when we don't do that it only increases the pressure on members to exploit loopholes like insider trading loopholes to make it on the backend," Ocasio-Cortez continued. "And that's my issue, is that it's superficial, you know, can vote against pay increases all you want, it's in my opinion voting against a pay, voting against a, it's not even like a raise, it's a cost of living adjustment."

"So, you can vote against a cost of living adjustment all you want and it'll look good on its surface but it will, every cost-of-living adjustment that, that gets bypassed, is voting to increase the pressure to exploit loopholes and legal loopholes to kind of lean on other ways to enrich oneself through service," Ocasio-Cortez concluded. "And so my whole side of it is like, it may not be optics, it may not be great optics, it may not like look the best in terms of your opponents could use it as a political, exploit as a political issue, but in substance, you might as well be transparent about a cost-of-living increase."

A cost of living increase on a $174,000 a year salary? Really?

  

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On 6/10/2019 at 11:49 AM, Impartial_Observer said:

I've borrowed money from time to time, no one ever held a gun to my head to sign on the dotted line. If you're unhappy with the juice, go somewhere else or don't borrow. It's not a difficult concept to grasp. 

You have apparently never read St. Augustine.

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9 hours ago, Howe said:

*Another Dice video*

Mr. Dice tends to be one of the last people to be producing a "reality" video.  

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Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez Plan to Cap Credit Card Interest Rates Will Backfire on Consumers: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/sanders-ocasio-cortez-plan-cap-credit-card-interest-rates-will-backfire

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Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently introduced their first joint piece of legislation — a proposal to impose a national interest-rate ceiling of 15% on all consumer credit products, from credit cards to payday loans. They promise that capping interest rates on credit cards and other consumer loans will benefit working families, but history indicates the benefit will come at the expense of everyone else — especially the half of all households who pay their balances every month.

The ubiquity of general purpose credit cards (such as Visa and MasterCard) for middle-class Americans is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1970 only 16% of American households had general purpose credit cards, and only two percent of low-income households, primarily because restrictive interest-rate ceilings made it too risky to lend to all but the wealthiest Americans. Credit card issuers offset their inability to charge a market rate of interest by imposing annual fees or bundling credit cards with other products such as checking accounts (which carried higher monthly fees in states with more restrictive usury ceilings). But consumers hate annual fees, especially those who do not carry balances but were forced to subsidize those who do. Moreover, annual fees were highly regressive, as every consumer paid the same annual card fee regardless of whether they charged $3,000 or $30,000 a year. Annual fees also stifled competition as most consumers were willing to pay to carry only one card, at most.

America’s complicated credit history

Retailers, such as department and appliance stores, had a more effective way to evade interest rate ceilings — they simply marked-up the price of the goods they sold to offset losses from their credit operations. One study from the era found the price of goods typically financed (such as major appliances) was 3% to 8% higher in states with more restrictive usury ceilings than the identical products in neighboring states. Consumers, especially higher-risk ones, obtained much more of their credit from retailers (instead of banks) in states with stricter usury ceilings. The need for retailers to provide financing for customers provided a major competitive advantage to huge department store chains (such as Sears and JC Penney) that could better bear the cost and risk of extensive credit departments over smaller competitors. Meanwhile, cash customers paid inflated retail prices to subsidize below-cost financing to credit purchasers.

Those who needed credit for non-durable goods, such as medical bills or a car repair, were forced to rely on providers such as high-cost personal finance company loans or pawn shops, which were often regulated by a different set of regulations or could avoid interest-rate ceilings by reducing the price offered for pawned goods.

We need lenders of last resort

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal would effectively outlaw these lenders of last resort too. History warns, however, that abolishing the supply of credit does not eliminate the demand. In states where usury ceilings eliminated alternative lenders, generations of desperate working-class families turned to illegal loan sharks that preyed on the urban working class for most of the Twentieth Century. So severe and chronic was the multi-billion dollar loan-sharking racket that eventually even consumer advocates and liberal politicians such as Robert Kennedy pleaded with state legislatures to raise or eliminate their interest rate ceilings so hard up families had legal choices.

The Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in “Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Services Corp. effectively deregulated credit card interest rates. Writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, liberal icon Justice William Brennan held that the applicable usury ceiling for banks chartered under federal law (which includes virtually every large credit card issuer), would be the issuing bank’s state law, instead of the customer’s. Credit card operations quickly migrated to states such as South Dakota, which allows rates on most credit cards to be set by markets instead of politics.

Legislation would invite legbreakers

The effective elimination of usury ceilings transformed the credit card market, as many previously-excluded consumers gained access to credit cards for the first time. By 1998,almost 75% of American households had general purpose cards. Annual fees have largely disappeared on credit cards. Competition for customers is fierce: Most card-owning households have multiple cards and they say that it is easy to switch cards if dissatisfied. Rewards are now commonplace, even among subprime cardholders, but likely would disappear under the Sanders-AOC proposal. Breaking the link between department stores and credit provision has enabled small merchants to compete with big ones on equal footing. And, of course, widespread access to credit cards was the necessary condition for the e-commerce revolution.

Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez promise lower interest rates for those who revolve balances on their credit cards. They ignore the reality that those who are lucky enough to still have credit cards if their proposal was adopted would be forced to subsidize those who carry balances through higher annual fees, fewer rewards, more pawn shops, and even the return of legbreakers. Perhaps someday Washington will consider a “Protection from Politicians Who Promise to Help Us” Act.

Agreed.  The federal government needs to keeps it's long nose out of this.

 

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