Sanders wants to replace credit reporting companies with public credit registry
vox.com
vox.com
This is just trying to solve a symptom with a deeper problem. The real problem is that our judicial system is absolutely cowardly towards corporation prosecution. If you actually just sent the responsible people to jail or actually bankrupted the worst actors, the situation would improve. This impacts everything from the financial industry to oil & gas to credit to privacy rights on the internet.
All of these companies get away with anything they want because we don't send the execs to jail and we rarely fine them more than the profits they made from doing the bad thing.
First, my score qualified me into a certain set of options (rates, points, etc) then they asked about specific details of the report after. But the score is the first pass/qualification.
What are they doing to suppress minorities?
[0] https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/15/14909764/study-vote...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/voter-id-study-re...
You can't imagine an American that cannot afford $50-100 for a government I.D.? You can imagine (& possibly smell) the feces on the street but not the poor people who excrete it?
We know most Americans can't come up with $400 for an emergency, are you going to act like this won't impact voting?
This thread is why people are forcing diversity quotas even when it seems unnecessary, income diversity should be next.
Also, you need an ID to have a bank account, buy a cellphone, buy alcohol or cigarettes.
Incorrect on all three accounts in the U.S.
Some states might have a law requiring ID for alcohol or cigarettes, but at least one definitely does not. Some stores actually violate their state's law with their store's ID policies.
I've done all three without ID (alcohol, not cigarettes though). Yes, it is possible to have a bank account without ID.
Where do you get that from? It seems incorrect: "You’ll need to provide a valid, government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, or a state ID card from the Department of Motor Vehicles." [1]
> Some states might have a law requiring ID for alcohol or cigarettes, but at least one definitely does not. Some stores actually violate their state's law with their store's ID policies.
All states require you to be 21 to buy alcohol. Which states do not require you to provide ID for that?
Seems like we might be splitting hairs here due to laws such as Indianas that "Indiana has a photo identification requirement for all off-premises transactions to anyone who is or reasonably appears to be less than forty (40) years of age." [3]
So yes, some liquor seller might be lax on enforcement or judge you to look over 40. However, that doesn't change the laws.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/how-to-open-a-bank-a... [2] https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0388-alcohol-laws-stat... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alcohol_laws_of_the_Un...
Personal experience. I've opened bank accounts online with credit unions. Never had to show them my ID, even when I went in person to withdraw cash.
If I was a third party reading these comments, I wouldn't trust a *.com website, but instead some law, or official govt website.
There's a lot of things in this word that "seem wrong" but are perfectly legal.
If you don’t have a U.S. government-issued SSN or ITIN, some banks and credit unions will accept a passport number and country of issuance, an alien identification card number, or other government-issued ID number." [1]
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/can-i-get-a-checkin...
Just to make sure we are on the same page, we are equating "ID" to a physical identification card, right? Since I think that's what this conversation stemmed from.
I bet those credit unions were just running my Social Security Number against a database to make sure it matched with the name, DOB, etc I provided.
I wonder if there is a legal definition of "verify" when it comes to banks and customers. Verifying could just be asking the customer, what their name is.
Getting someone’s social security card is hard so this plus a piece of mail or government picture IDs seem fair for an election. Basically, the banking bar.
Some counterpoints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHFOwlMCdto
So, like, a 24-pack of expensive hipster brew? $50?
It costs $31 to get an ID in California, and $9 if you can't afford $31.
They can afford their booze and still get an ID here, and hopefully in other states too.
Let's say we have 100k people that live in a few poor counties where not everyone has government ID and they can't afford to spend time / money to go very far. Now, if 40k of those people need an ID to vote, reducing the hours that the nearest DMV operates will reduce the number of people that get an ID.
Now, you might say, "but why can't they just go to the DMV in the next county?" or "why can't they get their IDs well ahead of time?", and you'd have a valid question! But when you have 100k people.. creating what looks like a minor inconvenience will definitely translate to fewer voters in the end. Now, lets create a bunch of minor inconveniences and the numbers really start to shrink.
I'm under the impression that to vote you must register in a voting district, surely that registration requires something like a birth certificate or a SSN, which I believe is the only requirement for a government issued ID... Operating on the idea that the requirement for government IDs may in fact be a good faith measure to prevent voter fraud, would perhaps an optimal solution be to bring a web camera to that voting registration area and simultaneously issue IDs there?
To be honest, I thought it was a non-issue since my voter registration is also my draft registration, so I assume I provided some form of citizenship proof when I registered. It was a while ago though so I don't recall the details.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/election-fraud-in-the-...
As to having non residents vote, vastly more eligible voters don’t vote than people ineligible to vote. Honestly, as much hoopla as this gets it’s clear from recent elections it’s a non issue. Look for actual examples of this happening and your coming up empty.
Can the same argument not be made for requiring voter IDs? youeseh I'm replying to says it's "few numbers" adding up. Another thread from sverige in this tree links vox and nyt saying that requiring ID has small numbers effect of turnout. So saying that their concern of voter fraud is a small numbers thing kind of lacks heft as an argument.
If these are both the case, then why not go with the requirement (and possibly make the requirement "easier" by issuing IDs at the same time/place) so there's no possibility of contesting the election results with regard to this particular issue?
Whereas suppressing turn out just requires making it difficult for someone to have a bunch of ID they normally don't need on them in any part of their lives.
These laws are never just "photo ID" - they're always a box truck of weird edge rules about the type of ID.
Also, the DMV offices, where I can get my state ID has plenty of locations and they're open often enough and long enough every day that it doesn't prevent people from getting their ID.
Between those two, I think we're doing a pretty good job of keeping enough people honest that voter suppression or voting fraud aren't big enough issues here.
In California, at least, you can just use your state ID number and last four digits of your SSN [1]. California gives IDs to illegal aliens and SSNs are available to many non-citizens. These might have been checked for citizenship or might not. I suspect that they are not since the SSA itself wants you to bring the naturalization certificate if you want to change your non-citizen SSN card to a citizen's one. California never asked me for proof of citizenship so either it has an access to the citizenship data unavailable to the SSA or it just registers anyone with an SSN and a state ID.
However, the available evidence suggests that at present, voter fraud in the US (at least of the type that voter ID would prevent) is extraordinarily rare. [1] It's so rare that any measure that even slightly decreases turnout rates will likely cost at least an order of magnitude (if not multiple) more legitimate votes than illegitimate ones, meaning that the overall accuracy of the voting results will be reduced.
There's plenty of time to change course if and when there's an actual uptick in voter fraud, as opposed to an uptick in evidence-free allegations from politicians.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B...
To get one, you have to ask for a date about 2 or 3 weeks in advance, and you go to one of the official buildings. The process takes like 15 minutes and they send the ID to your home 2 or 3 weeks later.
Sometimes the government puts a truck with a mobile office in some parks. Sometimes you can get one also in some big shopping malls without a previous date. And if you wish, you can pay more to get the ID in the next day. Also, you can make your passport in the same office.
If we can, you can.
When conservatives (racists) attack voters using economics (in this case a voter tax), they know precisely which non-white voters they are targeting.
Globally, it is pretty typical. Not just Mexico and the U.S., but France, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, Canada, Brazil, India, Israel. [1]
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state
We could start a campaign now, or just after the next election in 2020, and get people to sign up for cards by 2028, and enforce that then. We have census every 10 years, it's something the country can easily coordinate.
What hassle? Nearly everyone has them already for driving and they're valid for 6+ years. Might take an hour or two of your time every 6 or so years.
Only issues I could think of are: 1. No central registry of addresses, so how would the government know where to send the IDs. 2. Where would the photograph for the ID come from? 3. Possible fraud/abuse from stolen mail
I mean the solution to #1 is obvious: forced registration. I think you'll have a hard time getting people on board with passing a law for that.
It just seems like an hour at the DMV would solve all 3 problems at once: provide address, current photo, and reduce fraud/abuse. Seems like a good system to me.
Can you give me an example of what other country(-ies) system you're thinking about? I'm curious how it's handled elsewhere as well without the need to appear in person to get an ID.
The most common type of identification is a State driver's license, but there are also alternative non-driver license ID cards available. None of these IDs are mandatory, but are nearly required to live in modern society (open a bank account, drive a car, vote, etc).
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-po...
No, not nearly every eligible voters has one, and the distribution is significantly skewed by race and a number of other demographic factors.
And more than one of the politicians pushing voter ID has been recorded in what seemed to be politically safe venues pointing to those biases as motivating factors.
Have you tried educating yourself on the matter? For "some" reason, there are large swaths of land where people have to travel 25+ miles and pay with their already taxed income just for the displeasure of standing in line at the DMV/etc.
Tell me how much of a priority this is to someone who might not be able to drive their own car, or take time out of their job for.
I don't understand why someone would front their statement with "I'm a progressive liberal" while remaining intentionally obtuse, unless they're arguing in bad faith to begin with.
Particularly on a political thread.
Are government mandated requirements to produce an ID when purchasing a firearm an effort to prevent black ownership of legal firearms?
Once you get beyond the arguments around voting, it wildly begins to fall apart, and either shows a complete lack of logical consistency in standing up for minority rights, or an ulterior motive is at play.
The registration/license requirement which was introduced with the gun control act (with NRA backing) was pretty much introduced as a response to Black Panthers publically/legally carrying guns. So, in a way, yes.
As it is currently, it's absolutely a way to suppress the vote of low-income (and minority) people. In many areas of many states getting photo ID is non-trivial, especially if you're in a shitty job.
Everyone should have an ID because of how important they are for accessing government benefits, freedom of mobility, employment, etc.
If that means that getting an ID should pay you $100 instead of cost you $100 then I’m totally for that.
Again, to reiterate, I believe that getting an ID should be economically neutral at worst (which means you should be paid at least a few dollars for going through the trouble to get one) regardless of whether IDs are required to vote, but if a voting requirement is what it would take to make that happen it’s a perfect win/win.
We require ID in almost every kind of daily transaction imaginable, from healthcare to banking, employment, travel, alcohol, cigarettes, all other government services, and so on. But go apoplectic when we try to use it for one transaction every two years and act as if over half the population lacks the ability to participate in daily basic society.
Black people are intelligent enough to get ID's, as are women and any other minority in this country. The constant denigration as if they lack the faculties or intelligence to get an ID is pretty insulting.
Let's get real.
It is more than just requiring proper ID when voting. Turns out that you have to be on a list of pre-approved voters. There can be many reasons why you didn't end up on that list and many ways to bump you off.
Its not like you show up on voting day, scan your ID, and the system magically determines your eligibility to vote based on your current address, criminal record, age etc.. retrieved from a federal database that no one can question. No, the lists are prepared and very easy to game.
This recent article shows the growth in absentee ballots [0].
Most states allow no excuse absentee ballots but some states still require a reason. Some are republican states like Texas and West Virginia and South Carolina, but also includes most of New England- New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island all super blue.
[0] https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absente...
I haven’t seen Republicans calling for easy access to IDs though and their efforts to suppress voting from people who side with the left are notorious.
Their gerrymandered maps are being struck down in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and N. Carolina.
They conveniently close polling locations in minority neighborhoods.
They oppose election security bills. (McConnell until recently).
They oppose informing the public about election interference (McConnell).
Their PACs refuse to disclose donor information.
They’re pro dark money in elections.
Trump just tried to pressure the Ukranian leader for dirt on Biden.
The electoral college heavily favors Republicans and has given them at two Presidents in the last twenty years alone who lost the popular vote.
When Democrats are elected they’ll obstruct their Supreme Court nominations until they can put in their own.
The Senate heavily favors rural populations with the Dakota’s receiving four Senators with a population just over one million while California gets two with just under forty million people.
McConnell won’t even bring bills passed by the House to the floor of the Senate and has referred to himself as the Grim Reaper.
Republicans do not support making election days national holidays.
Republicans consistently try to scale back poll hours and early access voting.
Republicans are anti-democracy and a grave danger to our free nation at this point and it’s terrifying. They use every trick in the book to undermine the populace’s ability to elect leaders that do not serve the rich and the rich only. They stand for absolutely nothing except tax cuts, profits, unbridled corruption, and the selling off of America’s resources wholesale to the highest bidder.
Your assertion on how common voter fraud is contradic former NYC Democratic Commissioner of the Board of Elections Alan Schulkin which says it is prevalent in New York City, and he thinks there is a need for Voter ID laws: https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/117511800314022297...
This is a whole thread on how common fraud is: https://www.projectveritas.com/2018/11/13/elections-fraud-20...
And I’m not basing much of my world view on that guys unsubstantiated claims or three video clips posted on Project Veritas (a Conservative non-profit which receives funding from the Koch brothers).
There’s a tweet from Governor Abbot talking about investigating this issue from 2018. I conveniently see zero follow up as to the results of that investigation.
The source doesn't change the content of what they discovered, people caught red handed, or the statements made by officials such as NYC Democratic Commisioner Alan Schulkin.
I see no proof of people being caught redhanded and that’d be pretty easy to verify since voter fraud is a felony and they’d have a court cases.
It would take thousands of cases to sway most elections, so you’d need hundreds and hundreds of people to commit multiple felonies.
And yet somehow none of this giant conspiracy to manipulate voter fraud is leaking out? Seems implausible.
And they’d all need to assume identities of people already on the voter registration rolls.
So those hundreds of felons would have to somehow not take the vote of someone who would vote later that day, or someone who’d already voted.
This is a lot of work and a really grand conspiracy to keep under wraps.
It’s almost certainly easier, cheaper, and more effective to spread false narratives such as “voter fraud is a big issue and only Republicans care about the sacredness of _your_ vote” than it is to actually somehow find and organize enough people to make it worthwhile.
Maybe it is a different situation in India, but here the people proposing voter identification laws are doing so in bad faith.
They’re trying to make it harder to vote so elections are less fair, as opposed to making elections more fair by guaranteeing the sanctity of the individuals vote which is the position they’re pretending to be standing on.
In Norway, my home country, it has never been an issue in our 200 years as an independent country for anyone to get an ID to vote. And we used to be mostly dirt poor fishers and farmers that often lived in fairly isolated places.
Instituting the voter ID law makes it harder for 6.5% of people that rarely vote for Republicans to vote to prevent 0.000X% of votes cast fraudulently each election.
Do you get it now?
The reason why I think so is that people that are not poor can not lead their lives without a bank account due to the essentials for a non poor life requiring a bank account.
They don’t care about voter fraud. At all.
They care about adding enough shit together that they can win elections.
That is all they care about.
It is not in good faith. It is not about protecting the sanctity of elections.
It is about the opposite. They’ve never been able to show that voter fraud has ever affected an election.
They’re in it because even shaving a percentage of people from voting Democrat is worth it for them.
That is it. That’s the only reason.
Goodbye.
I agree that the government should not rate credit worthiness.
But we need a trusted third party that tracks your credit history (just the data of what/when you got credits, and missed payments). Something that the banks and loan shop could consult and compute their own risk assessment.
In some European countries, the central bank is the notary authority that keeps track of bad actors (missed payments, bounced checks, etc.) and private banks or loan shop can consult the registry and make their own decision if you are not credit worthy.
Anyways, ordinary business and our lives shouldn't be the concern of federal government. It is a different matter if a state went ahead with it.
A score is opaque based on proprietary models, and scores can still be derived by private companies.
The last time I checked my credit report, it was a (false) list of ex-employers and ex-addresses.
The credit agencies use "undisclosed" methods to verify their data. What would the government do instead?
It doesn’t say whether the bill will ban “private” credit score providers, but I’m not sure how it will put those companies out of business if not.
Or the Obama-era IRS supposedly targeting conservative groups. [1]
Without going down the rabbit's hole of which claims were true and by how much....it's certainly the sort of thing you would rather remove as far as possible from politics.
On the other hand, it must not transform into what the CCP is doing. It has to stay true to being a proxy for credit worthiness —that is all. No handicapping either or dings for "unapproved" ideas, behavior, purchases, etc.
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/27/560308997/irs-apologizes-for-...
Spoiler: both liberal and conservative groups were subject to extra scrutiny via keyword triggers, but only conservative groups got a settlement for whatever reason only Trump knows. Trump was smart enough not to let it go to court (lest any facts get argued for real).
For the actions committed under the previous liberal administration.
Trump becomes president: see, I told you, the IRS under Obama was corrupt! Let’s settle everything and withdraw all criminal charges (because you can’t just say people are guilty) so a judge/jury doesn’t actually determine anything.
But maybe this is valid under Trump supporter logic, I guess.
Government is accountable to an electorate, private businesses are not (see: Equifax).
Effective PR?
Democratic representation is one of the leakiest abstractions ever devised.
Why not do away with the whole concept of credit rating entirely? In Europe we have government (or government adjacent entities) run credit report systems but the only data they get and you get out of them is if you've ever been delinquent (thanks to the GDPR - before that they shared more info.) And even then you have to be a registered financial institution to even be able to ask for the info. There's no scoring or rating based on how well you've performed as a consumer with your credit cards or whatnot, just a red flag in case you're a serious risk of nonpayment.
People don't trust credit industries or the government. But with the stories popping around ICE, with the history of government registries like the no-fly list and the terrorism watch list that just got declared unconstitutional after over a decade...
Right or wrong, I think some people believe that government corruption is more dangerous than industry corruption. You have to put all of Bernie's policies into the context of, "Trump probably wasn't an aberration, and we probably will get another administration like this at some point in the future, even if it's a decade from now." American politics are pretty predictable over the long run: we have regular party swaps, and occasionally they line up so one party controls both the presidency and Congress. The wild card there is the Supreme Court, but (packing debates aside) that's likely going to remain Republican-controlled for a reasonably long time.
So odds are pretty good that anything we build now is something that Trump v2 will some day get to control.
With that in mind, remember that we've pretty recently had debates about whether or not the census was going to include a citizenship question, and whether or not the trademark office could ask for green cards. For all of Equifax's (many) faults, it's not as trivial for an administration to get to start actively disenfranchising immigrants.
People do want the credit industry to be regulated, and they want the ability to opt-out of at least some credit reporting. But they're also nervous about building a system where the people who decide the rules are the same people who run the system. The ability to apply for credit is so ridiculously important for so many people. It would give Trump v2 a lot of additional power to target unpopular groups.
On the other hand, a state-owned agency is often very bureaucratic, and thus it has built-in deficiensies and resource hungry regulatives that slow things down to a crawl. All that does is to incentivice paying for speed, which would of course be corruption.
On top of that, private companies aren't subject to change every time Government changes, and leadership change within the private sector tend to be efficiency / profit centered, while Government change is much more complex, and often based on quaint special interests that need to be politically pleased. Or the bar is set higher for it to happen, because politically changing the policies of private companies would involves actual laws that need to be voted in, rather than departmentally set regulatives.
Strange because my experience has been the exact opposite in every case, with the exception of police - and that's only because I don't have an immediate proxy. That private industry provides alternatives to these public goods and does them better is an indictment of the competence of our government, and shouldn't be viewed as an endorsement or evidence in favor of free markets for everything. These markets emerge because of government incompetence, not because of corruption or because the market is inherently "better".
You do opt-in when you sign credit agreements and the like.
Since all creditors require it your options are to opt-in to credit reporting or opt-out of borrowing.
if.
So I'm not tracked if I've never taken a loan or credit card?
I will in advance disagree with the objection that this would make it impossible for the lending industry to operate. I have run a lending business before, and in the industry FICO score is much less valuable than a lot of other information available to lenders (demographic, income, assets). For asset-based lending (car loans, mortgages, etc), FICO is even more irrelevant compared to factors like loan-to-value.
I don't think it's a good idea to go back to the bad old days before credit reporting where whether you could get a loan or not was based on your demographics (color of your skin) rather than on the objective criterion in a credit report.
Oh I know. The world isn't perfect in this respect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be thanks to credit reporting. It has been an incredibly powerful tool for social justice. Outlawing it as a tool would be a very large step backwards.
Anyway, rather than a draconian approach of outlawing credit bureaus, I think a law making third-party credit reporting optional rather than required is the right thing to push for, and more realistic than a nonstarter suggestion like nationalizing the credit bureaus.
Now, creditworthiness is judged on more objective measures, which makes it easier to buy a house, start a business, etc. I think we should hold credit organizations meaningfully responsible for data breaches - but at the same time, let's not get rid of the benefits by tossing credit reporting out entirely.
Except it isn't. In the current system, you could be signed on to your parents credit card in high school and get a far better credit rating than someone who got their first credit card after college. Building credit is pretty easy to do and easy to game.
An objective system would be if the bank just saw your income and expenses and debts to determine whether or not you're worthy of a loan, not that you've had that capital one card in your sock drawer for five years and use your amex for your netflix subscription.
My little credit reporting anecdote is that of a good friend who came from Germany to practice medicine. Getting a home loan was a pain in the ass because he had zero credit history, despite his hourly rate being multiples of whatever the branch manager of that bank was making.
I have never paid to see my credit score, so I'm not sure how this is novel?
Also, are things not going well at Vox? 900px (height!) of ads at the top of the page along with Outbrain trash and numerous right-rail ads and inside-the-content ads (on desktop) do not give the impression of a thriving publication.
I guess they've given up the constraint and minimalism that helped them get to #1 in the first place. Once again the obsession with never ending growth is compromising the utility of the top players and pressures the regulators to do something.
Google should be happy there are ad blockers, otherwise there'd be a lot more outcry and pushback from the influential tech community.
You're the product being sold.
OTOH Governments have a tendency to pass laws the make suing them very hard even when they do screw up, so who knows what the ideal solution is?
It is a democratic monopoly, but democracy among 300+ million people is a big hammer. Do you really, actually think that this will be a well-run service where mistakes are quickly corrected?
No. It will just be an extra layer of protection for any mistakes that are made. At least private companies have to fear the government at some level... who does the federal government fear when it does somethihn unfair? The voter? Hah.
There are lots of situations where I think that is preferred, but people won't look at it this way because of socialism/communism scare.
Eliminating racial bias is admirable, but is not a thing that we have any idea how to do in any computationally rigorous way, certainly not as assumed in that language.
Modern credit scoring for anything that matters involves lender and context specific analytics. It's a much richer process than the imagined single monolithic FICO score.
In this world, giving a single entity a monopoly in generating these bespoke scores is, simply for mechanical reasons, a complete non-starter.
The way to deal with profit-oriented lenders making what seem to be unfair credit decisions is to have a credit process that solves for fairness, not profit. That amounts to starting from a place of making capital grants, something the government is very good at, and which would be a better angle for Bernie to be taking.
Andrew Yang's UBI proposal could be tweaked to optionally, at the receivers request, treat the grants in part as low interest rate loans, allowing receivers to create a credit history if they so desire.
It's a question of if the outcomes are distributed differently among races because the races represent truly different probabilities, or because the inputs to the model were already tainted against some race. For example, let's say you judge creditworthiness based on membership in a particular honors society, but that honors society doesn't exist at historically black colleges.
I think we should just go back to what we did before credit ratings, which was basically best due diligence and requiring just a little bit more documentation for a loan application
I also think in lieu of this the government can be a net positive here. In the EU this is the norm from what I understand
This makes no sense. Banks can set whatever interest rate they want. It's in their best interest to give trustworthy people as low as interest rate as they can.
Traditionally there were hard ceilings on acceptable interest rates in most circumstances.
After the Supreme Court ruling however this was no longer the case as companies could setup shop in a friendly state that had high interest rate ceilings. This is the reason so many lending outfits are based in South Dakota (on paper at least) as they were the first state that took advantage of this.
Now when FICO became a thing in 1989 it’s one expressive goal was to maximize this opportunity to give lenders an optimal (e.g highest) rates they could charge customers for their loans. It doesn’t help the consumer at all in this regard.
As an aside, one interesting thing I noticed over the years fielding applications for open units, EVERY single person in the world who has bad credit or subpar credit apparently has the same psycho ex. It was rather amusing hearing that story over and over again. If you have poor credit and you're trying to rent a place- own up to it and be honest about why it's bad!
Not to dismiss the point though, but it’s also extremely anecdotal. I don’t know that it would actually hold true statistically that this would be the majority case.
Escpially given I myself have been under 750 and I have never had these issues
I like the idea of killing off the existing credit rating industry, though. I would prefer it just be heavily regulated as a utility and run by an entity outside the gov.
Here's the key quote:
> "Last year, the The Intercept published a government document that spelled out the process for putting suspects in the terrorist database. The guidelines say agencies can nominate candidates for the list if there is “reasonable suspicion” to believe they are a “known or suspected terrorist.” That’s a relatively low bar, and the guidelines even make clear that agencies don’t need “concrete facts” or “irrefutable evidence” to back up their assertions. The guidelines also give a single White House official unilateral authority to place entire categories of people on the no-fly list."
We can only guess whether the public credit registry will be run with the same, better, or worse level of care and due diligence.
And before you say "omg Trump!!11" note that this article is from June 2016 and the leaked guidelines are from March 2013.
Love the idea of a totally open credit bureau that values privacy and does not use medical loans against us. And has full transparency....
I do however not trust the government as we've seen w/ Trump it could easily swing from leftist egalitarianism to rightist fascism in 1-2 election cycles. Then they could use credit scores as a weapon.
I think instead the government should create a regulation platform for credit agencies where they must follow certain principles to be allowed to operate as such including:
* No medical debt.
* Full transparency on how credit scores are scored -- perhaps even being required to use a government sanctioned algorithm.
* Free credit reports to consumers and other tooling.
* Must provide free counselling and support to consumers.
* May make profit from government grants + charging businesses for report access.
* Must offer ways to notify consumers when their reports have been accessed, by who, and when, and allow consumer to revoke and remove access at will.
* Must be protect privacy EVEN from government agencies, to ensure highest level of security for consumers.
Edit: a nice addition would be if they did have more integrations with government programs though, so say every citizen in the credit system is an automatically registered voter in their most recent locale.
The rest of his plan involves shrinking the usage of credit scores so that it doesn't affect employment, housing or insurance so I imagine this would lead (ideally) to the general phasing out of the ubiquitous credit scoring nonsense we have to deal with.