First off, as I've said before, Oliver needs to lose the cringey comedy bits when he's trying to cover a serious topic, as it's just brutal. This is especially true when he lacks an audience to play off.
But getting to the content, this piece is garbage, and I did watch it with an open mind.
Among his points:
- Bankruptcy is racist (lol)
- Somehow Chapter 13 (reorganization) is terrible because attorneys charge more for it, and because the whole thing is rescinded if you miss one payment. Ooooooooookay? So we should give someone the benefit of a Chapter 13 reorg and just let them miss payments with no consequence? Why would anyone file Chapter 7 then?
- Most people who file bankruptcy are there due to totally uncontrollable and unforeseeable life circumstances, and not primarily due to their own irresponsible behavior. While this is true for some personal bankruptcy filers, the vast majority got there due to bad decision making.
- It's really bad and awful that bankruptcy affects your ability to get credit going forward. You know, because banks should just ignore the creditworthiness of people they lend to.
- Bankruptcy is totally unfair because it costs $1,000 to file chapter 7, and some people "can't afford $1,000". He demonstrated this by showing a video of a couple who claimed they were $50k in debt but "can't afford the $1,000 to declare chapter 7". In the meantime, they were sitting in a well-appointed home where simply selling some of their shit could easily raise $1,000 many times over.
The above idiotic points drowned out some of the good points he made earlier in the video, essentially that credit card companies are incentivized by the current structure to keep people in an endless cycle of minimum payments, high interest, and late fees. Oliver is actually correct there, and I'd love to see some reform regarding predatory credit card practices. (On a side note, I'd also like to see super-high-interest payday loans made illegal, or heavily reformed.)
As you guys have seen over the years, while I'm a conservative, I also have a consumer advocacy streak in me, and am by no means an apologist for the big banks. So I watched this video hopeful that Oliver would bring up key flaws in our credit/bankruptcy system which are deserving of reform.
Instead, we got, "BANKRUPTCY IS RACIST Y'ALL" and "LEAVE BANKRUPTCY FILERS ALONE!! EVEYRONE DESERVES A 2ND, 3RD, 4TH, 5TH, AND 6TH CHANCE!!!!11"