(WELCOME TO ALL OF THE READERS FROM FRESH POLITICS AND REASON"S HIT & RUN -- THANKS TAYLOR)

Talk about misleading terms -- there is no such thing as a "ghetto tax". There is, however, a real issue of higher costs to life in poverty, or in certain areas of a city, county, state, or country.

But let's look at the NY Times scare story.

Drivers from low-income neighborhoods of New York, Hartford and Baltimore, insuring identical cars and with the same driving records as those from middle-class neighborhoods, paid $400 more on average for a yearÂ’s insurance.

Gee -- my insurance would be $200 less a year if I lived on the other side of the 100-yard wide body of water separating Harris County and Galveston County -- because Harris County has a higher rate of auto claims than Galveston County.

The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at “rent to own” stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700.

Because of the choice to buy new rather than used items -- and the resulting cost associated with going to the rent-to-own stores. That is simply bad economic decision-making.

But I will agree, in part, with the proposals made by the Brookings Institution -- though not with the alarmist cries of these liberals about the unfairness of it all.

Part of the problem, the study found, is a discrepancy between the poor and the middle class in consumer skills and mobility: people who comparison-shop, especially on the Internet, tend to pay hundreds less for the identical car than those who walk onto a city lot and buy.

But the disparities can be reduced, the report said, not only by consumer education but also by some combination of incentives to lure banks and stores into poor neighborhoods and tighter regulation on things like the fees of storefront lenders.

And those considerations are real. When I lived in St. Louis 20 years ago, I watched one neighborhood blossom after it got a major supermarket plunked down in the middle of it. Rather than shopping at the corner gas station or the little mom & pop store on the corner, the people in the neighborhood tended to shop at the bigger store. They also got jobs in the enighborhood. The extra cash began tob e saved, banks came into the area, and you saw growth.

But the notion of a "ghetto tax", with its demeaning implications and hints of racism in policy choices, is wrong. What you are dealing with is the natural working of the capitalist system.

Posted by: Greg at 09:44 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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