You might think that policymakers would take a keen interest in the
amounts that are stolen, coerced or extorted from the poor, but there
are no official efforts to track such figures. Instead, we have to
turn to independent investigators, such as Kim Bobo, author of Wage
Theft in America, who estimates that wage theft nets employers at
least $100 billion a year and possibly twice that. As for the profits
extracted by the lending industry, Gary Rivlin, who wrote Broke USA:
>From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. - How the Working Poor Became Big
Business, says the poor pay an effective surcharge of about $30
billion a year for the financial products they consume - and more than
twice that if you include subprime credit cards, subprime auto loans
and subprime mortgages.
These are not, of course, trivial amounts. They are on the same order of magnitude as major public programmes for the poor. The US government distributes about $55 billion a year, for example, through the largest single cash-transfer programme for the poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit; at the same time, employers are siphoning off twice that amount, if not more, through wage theft.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."