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Insurers justify the use of credit screening for insurance purposes by pointing to internal industry data showing that, on average, people with lower scores are more likely to make an insurance claim. The problem is, they don’t have a convincing explanation for why people with poor credit tend to make more claims.

Population levels will continue to increase consumption levels don't have to.

We are at a crossroads: do we choose economic growth or environmental sustainability?

It’s not often that good news comes out of Washington. Today is an exception: the Obama Administration is expected to deny TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sand pipeline application.

A few weeks ago, Desmogblog.com released a series of internal documents from the Heartland Institute, one of the leaders of the climate denial movement, which shows the Institute’s strategy for pushing their climate denying message.

Fiscal hawks love to remind us that interest payments on the national debt will be a major driver of future U.S. budget deficits. Just last week, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) published a doom-and-gloom paper that noted that interest payments were the single fastest growing part of the U.S. budget and the most volatile area of future spending.

The CFPB released a report this week that should serve as a reminder of what a functional Congress could accomplish. The report highlights the ways in which the 2009 Credit CARD Act has succeeded. Their findings:

Growth doesn't work. It doesn't deliver the claimed social and economic benefits. 

One of the most alarming aspects of a possible default is also one that gets the least attention: A default would raise the cost of federal borrowing, perhaps for years to come, and send the deficit soaring. 

If Treasury securities become, well, less secure, the United States will have to pay investors more to buy them. Hence higher interest rates on new debt that is issued. 

Those Bush tax cuts are a gift that just keeps on giving. They are a big reason the national debt is so high, requiring huge interest payments, and a big reason that the Treasury faces such large shortfalls every month between what comes in the door and what goes out.

Yet, somehow, conservatives have managed to spin the national debt strictly as a "spending problem." And strangely, Democrats have largely let them do that with barely a word about how low taxes got us in this jam.

If you think that only banks and other traditional lenders get to gouge consumers with high interest rate loans, you're obviously behind on the evolution of American finance. 

These days, just about any service provider can offer loans with what used to be criminally high interest rates. And that includes doctors and dentists, as the New York Times reports today. 

Assuming some short-term deal emerges in Washington to avert a default, pending later budget talks, we all know what comes next: Another dead-end debate over taxes.

Why? Because if there's one issue that conservatives in Congress are even more implacable about than Obamacare it's taxes -- as in, no new taxes, ever. 

We are in the midst of National Protect Your Identity Week, and credit reporting giant Experian is kicking off the festivities with some ID theft prevention tips, such as signing up for Experian’s own credit monitoring service at a cost of $14.95 a month.

Generational theft has occurred on a massive scale.

The most likely consequence of the sequestration will be be slower growth and lower tax revenues, and it’s a distinct possibility that the sequestration could actually increase the deficit.

Payday lenders have found a powerful friend in the Pew Charitable Trusts. In a recent report on payday lending -- the culmination of two years of work -- Pew embraces reforms to this industry that would still allow the poorest Americans to be charged annual interest rates in the triple digits. 

It's no secret that wealthy Americans have enjoyed low taxes since the dawn of the Reagan era—even as they have scored huge income gains thanks to changes in the economy. A less well-known fact, though, is that middle and low-income earners have seen far bigger cuts in their federal taxes, which has helped offset stagnant incomes for these groups and may explain why there hasn't been a bigger revolt against income inequality in America. 

The Pew Charitable Trusts blew a major opportunity to condemn the exploitative practice of payday lending when it issued a major report on this issue a few days ago -- the culmination of over two years of careful research.