this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Only people who are bad credit risks ever come up with this take, lmao.
The sole function of credit scores is to benefit people who are reliably 'good for it' when they borrow money. Without them, everyone is treated as just as high a risk as the worst borrowers who are least likely to pay back their debts, and you gain no benefit from reliably paying back your debts. But with them, your good borrowing is kept track of, and good reputation means lenders trust you more to pay your debts back, so they're willing to lend more, and they are willing to charge less interest.
Removing credit scores changes nothing for bad borrowers, and hurts good borrowers.
The thing is you're forgetting who are good borrowers and who are bad borrowers. A person with a low income with a precarious job will be a very bad borrower, and imposing a higher interest rate on them on top of that is just the final nail in the coffin. We generally believe universal healthcare is good, and we don't want to discriminate "good health" and "bad health" people and make unhealthy people pay more, do we?
That's the only way to justify loaning to people like that at all, given how much more often they default (and the lender never gets repaid at all). If lenders were forced to give the same interest rate to everyone, that would cause them not to lend to "A person with a low income with a precarious job" at all.
If the lenders operate with the purpose of maximizing profit, then yeah, it makes sense not to loan money to people in precarious situations except at high interest rates, that's my whole point: that's evil, the profit motive leads to evil decisions. Let's have public banks instead, where interest rates for loans are equalised, in the same way that every taxpayer gets identical access to healthcare regardless of how much they contribute through their income.
You're discounting the people who have always lived within their means and so never took on debt. They also don't have good credit. They've never missed a payment. They're good for the money. But they don't have a history showing that because they've never needed that.
No I'm not. Those people are unknown quantities, and so also suffer if credit scores go away, because bad borrowers are worse than first-time borrowers, so without credit scores, first-timers will be treated worse.
I'm saying people who don't play this credit game but otherwise are good financially also think it's dumb. Not just bad risks.