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Members of America's military have a difficult and dangerous enough job without predatory lenders trying to trap them in a financial quagmire. Yet they are preyed upon every day in Tucson and throughout the nation.

What a way to treat the men and women from whom we ask so much.

The problem has three parts:

First, for a variety of reasons, members of the military have more serious financial problems than their civilian counterparts.

Second, these financial troubles ripple throughout the military. They impair unit readiness. And contending with the service members' financial problems costs the armed forces $1 billion per year, or more.

Third, predatory lenders exacerbate the financial problems for both the individuals and the military by deliberately targeting the service members. These predators include especially payday lenders and auto title loan companies.

Arizona's Legislature could help stop the predators. But with only a few exceptions, the legislators actually seem more interested in protecting the financial vultures that victimize the military, the poor and the unsophisticated.

That statement may seem unfair to the 90 men and women we elect to represent us, but how else can one explain the passage of laws that allow lenders to charge interest rates in excess of 400 percent per year?

My emphasis on military victims candidly is a calculated attempt to catch the legislators' attention. But it is justified.

"Predatory lenders, check cashers, high-cost car dealers and insurance groups will often station themselves around military installations in hopes of grabbing as many hard-earned military dollars as possible," the nonprofit Association of the United States Army said in 2003. "In the end, they can sometimes prove to be more harmful to troops and troop morale than the enemy in the battlefield."

That is an astonishing statement, and I would like to believe it is an exaggeration. But I asked the Defense Department about the importance to the military of predatory lenders. Spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers told me in an e-mail, "Predatory lending is one of our key issues." He said the department is working actively to limit the lenders' effects.

The Army Association added, "Currently, the worst financial offenders to military communities are 'payday lenders.' "

Financial problems common

Serving in the military is one of the country's most honorable occupations, but it is also an occupation that breeds financial stress. In 2002 the Rand Corp. reported that 20 percent of the men and women in America's military say creditors have pressured them. That compares with 10 percent of the civilian population. Based on that and other statistics, the report concludes: "Military personnel are substantially more likely to have financial problems than their civilian counterparts."

Military pay raises in recent years have helped, but Rand found the financial problems were not related to income. The culprit is spending patterns and the lack of financial management skills. That shouldn't be surprising in a field that attracts younger, less-well-educated people, many of whom come from financially disadvantaged backgrounds and who are separated, perhaps for the first time, from family and friends. Young service members also are more likely to be married than their civilian counterparts and, consequently, to face greater financial demands.

Besides making the service members more vulnerable to predators, these financial problems have surprisingly severe personal effects. Rand reported financial problems were "a more widely perceived source of stress than many military-related factors, such as deployments, work situations and military reassignments."

That stress was emphasized also by a 1998 Virginia Tech analysis of Navy workers that found financial concerns have a greater effect on an individual serviceman or servicewoman's operational readiness than housing, child care, health care, a spouse's job or the neighborhood.

Ripple effect

It should be no surprise that the consequences of personal financial problems ripple out from the individuals through their military units.

The Government Accountability Office reports, "Serious financial problems can adversely affect unit morale and readiness." The GAO adds, "Service members with severe financial problems risk losing security clearances, incurring administrative or criminal penalties or, in some cases, face discharge."

Rand noted that financial difficulties can interfere with a military unit's mission if members are sent home during deployments to solve financial emergencies and cause members to arrive late for their jobs, to leave early, to be injured on the job or to perform below their normal levels.

Of course, if it's a dangerous job, and the service member is distracted by thinking about a car being repossessed back home, for instance, then that can be disastrous. As Davis-Monthan Air Force Base spokeswoman Maj. Laurel Tingley says, "Airmen's lives depend on being focused on the task at hand."

Additionally, the service members' financial problems are expensive for the armed forces. The Virginia Tech report, which may understate the expense because it is now seven years old, estimated the personal financial problems of service members cost the Defense Department close to $1 billion annually.

Deliberate targeting

As if all this weren't already reason enough for the Legislature to act, consider that the payday lenders and other predators deliberately target the men and women of the military.

"We suspect that military towns are favorite hunting grounds of the payday lenders," Defense Department spokesman Shavers said in his e-mail to me. He said 9 percent of all enlisted personnel and 12 percent of mid-level noncommissioned officers used payday loans.

Here in Tucson, Davis-Monthan does not have statistics on how many airmen are using such loans. But Tingley says, "The availability of such loans and the fact that airmen are such easy targets for payday lenders tells us the problem is likely more prevalent than we can statistically gather."

Brian Crump, Southern Arizona regional manager for QC Financial Services, Inc., which operates under the name Quick Cash, denies the firms are legally "predatory" lenders and disputes that they target the military. He e-mailed me a copy of the industry's "best practices" for lending to the military. But the best practices are only voluntary, and there is compelling evidence of the targeting, both nationally and locally.

Scholarly evidence came in March 2005, when two professors reported on their study of 15,000 payday lenders in 20 states, including Arizona.

"There is irrefutable geographic evidence demonstrating payday lenders are actively and aggressively targeting U.S. military personnel," concluded Christopher Lewis Peterson, a law professor from the University of Florida, and Steven M. Graves, a geographer and mapping expert from California State University-Northridge.

The professors found 12 more payday lenders around Davis-Monthan than expected. I wrote about that study in July and also about a study by the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Economic Integrity that found some of the heaviest concentrations of the payday lenders were within three miles of D-M.

The predators' operations, in fact, are designed to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of military communities.

Because service members generally are low-paid, they are more likely to need financial help. However, as the National Consumer Law Center points out in a report on how firms target the military, service members "have a far longer list of economically attractive qualities than most low-income people." These qualities include "a working population that receives U.S. government paychecks on a rock-solid schedule — a golden guarantee to the payday lending industry especially — and that is in no danger of being laid off. A population that's easy for debt collectors to track. (And) a military culture that urges people to keep their finances in order as part of good-conduct codes."

The consequence is that once a predatory lender embeds its claws into a service member, the lender is almost assured of extracting substantial money.

The Legislature's role

The Arizona Legislature cannot solve these problems by itself, of course. Federal legislation is needed, as is legislation in all the other states. And banks and credit unions need to offer alternatives.

But Arizona's Legislature can take significant actions, including placing fair limits on interest rates, requiring more realistic loan terms than 14 days and prohibiting the payday loan industry's pernicious reliance on post-dated checks.

Significantly, Peterson and Graves found that "all state legal strategies except for aggressive criminal prosecution of usury laws have been ineffective in deterring this commercial behavior."

In 2000, when the Legislature passed laws to allow payday lenders, it included a provision to sunset the laws in 2010. Now, realizing that is just four years away, the loan companies are asking for the date to be extended. It shouldn't be. That is not just my opinion. The Defense Department takes the same position.

"The department supports states retaining their existing usury law limits or providing a 'sunset clause' to existing exceptions to these usury limits that allow for payday lending practices," Shavers wrote to me.

"The department was supportive of Georgia in their effort to repeal their payday lending statute, North Carolina in sustaining their current sunset of payday lending statutes, and Pennsylvania in not establishing a statute to allow for payday lending practices during their 2005 legislative session," Shavers added.

Clearly, for the military, the issue of predatory lenders is both humane — concern for the well-being of the service members — and practical — trying to maintain operational readiness and not to waste hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on solving problems aggravated by predatory lenders.

For the rest of us, the question is broader: What kind of society do we want? Are we willing to apathetically stand by as the lenders prey on the low-income or desperate?

And for Arizona's legislators, I'll make the question even more pointed: Are they going to continue allowing predators to prey on the military men and women from whom we ask so much?