Your Credit Score Isn't a Reflection of Your Moral Character

[douglas9]

What kind of person racks up debts and doesn’t pay them? Your credit score is an attempt to answer this question. These important three-digit numbers summarize our statistical risk for lenders. The allure of the credit score is its clarity: It cuts through appearances and converts our messy lives into an easily readable metric. The difference between a score of 750 and 600 is obvious. One is an excellent bet for a lender to make; the other is not. On balance, credit scores have made borrowing more convenient, and fairer, for consumers.

But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to use credit scores for an entirely different purpose, one they were never built for and are not suited for. The agency charged with safeguarding the nation would like to make immigrants submit their credit scores when applying for legal resident status.

The new rule, contained in a proposal signed by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, is designed to help immigration officers identify applicants likely to become a “public charge”—that is, a person primarily dependent on government assistance for food, housing, or medical care. According to the proposal, credit scores and other financial records (including credit reports, the comprehensive individual files from which credit scores are generated) would be reviewed to predict an applicant’s chances of “self-sufficiency.” The proposal is open for public comment until Dec. 10.

Setting aside the proposal’s moral abdication when it comes to the needy, we should be troubled by another injustice: its abuse of personal metrics.


https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/dhs-credit-scores-legal-resident-assessment.html

[Crutchez_CuiBono]

1. Wheres the WH russians taxes?

5-6 bankruptcies and he's president? The irony is unbelievabl;e

[Nitram]

2. Rather than a reflection of moral character, a credit score can be a reflection of impulse

control and ability to plan for the future. The credit card just digs a deeper hole for people who are not earning a living wage.

[Igel]

3. I'm not going to say those two are unrelated.

If you lack impulse control and want to do immoral things, there's certainly a connection.

If you have great impulse control and want to do immoral things, your actions can turn out to be moral in the "do no wrong" sense. And for many, that's a breakthrough, leave "now do right" for another day.


Now, the content of the article and the headline, those are unrelated. If you are "immoral" because of no impulse control, it means you're not likely to be able to navigate life without at some point running a greater risk of needing public subsidization at the personal level. And that's all the metric's intended to show: likelihood of being self-sufficient versus assistance-reliant.

It's a separate argument as to whether credit score shows that with any great reliability. I'd have considered that worth examining, if it was a reasonable argument and not a bit of lopsided advocacy that picked only supporting facts, out of context if necessary, and omitted contrary facts or inconvenient context, all to reach the "moral" and therefore desired conclusion. I like seeing at the end of a good argument "QED," standing for "what which was to be proven" rather than at the start, "Assuming that we're correct--and we know we are--then we're correct, and can denounce all those in opposition as evil-intentioned fools. There, how's that for logic?"

[JonLP24]

5. I was in a relationship with step kids

Why I racked so much debt. If I was single I could have easily saved a lot of money.

[customerserviceguy]

4. As a society, we don't care

I learned that several years ago, when a state had on it's ballot an initiative to stop the use of credit scores by automobile insurance companies, and it lost. And the state in question was solid-blue Oregon.

Human beings are always looking for reasons to say, "Well, that bad thing can't happen to me because _____________." And they can be eager to use whatever divide-and-conquer means that big business types hand them as an excuse to find themselves as being better than the people that they are encouraged to shit on.

[ck4829]

6. K&R

[EarthFirst]

7. Except for the fact that many immigrants and asylum seekers have never had debt or credit...

It’s assumed that having no outstanding lines of credit is as detrimental to your FICO score as having limited or sub-par credit.

So to utilize this metric for immigration status is simply a way of green-washing the immigration debate away from the underlying situation: their vehement xenophobia towards immigrants.