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Today, payday lenders have numerous opponents in almost every state with a variation of the same message. “Payday loans are loan sharks”. A special interest group, Arizonans for Responsible Lending even launched a television campaign featuring a “Lenny the Loan Shark”, a fairly predictable ad that features a slick, greasy looking Italian guy. Before viewing this ad I may have made the error of assuming someone from Arizona was a New Yorker.

Thankfully, I now know they have the same accent so I can avoid offending any Italian-Arizonans by mistakenly asking them if they are from New York. This commercial may not be so ethnic-conscious. They even threw in the theme music from The Sopranos just in case you were in danger of missing the point: You are stupid and don’t know how to manage your money, and apparently an Italian guy is going to take it from you.

Instead of resembling a poorly done mafia sketch from MadTV, they should have focused on cash loan alternatives for the working lower class. The problem is, there aren’t any. The reason people use a payday loan company is because they’re in a desperate situation, can’t pay rent, car or credit card payment, or they can’t feed their children. There are emergencies in life, and not everyone has $300 stashed away to fix their car so they can go to work.

Maybe the Arizona legislation should focus why so many people need a payday loan. Obviously the people who took out a sub-prime mortgage are being hurt more than the CEO’s of banks and mortgage lenders that are now bankrupt. The most painfully ironic part of all of this is that these CEO’s aren’t standing next to the poor they swindled looking for money. No, thanks to the multi-billion dollar bail-out supported by presidential hopeful John McCain, an Arizona Senator, they all received multi-million dollar severance packages even though their business failed.

These services, such as a guaranteed cash advance allow people with poor credit to access a fast cash advance during hard times. Take this away and what options are left? Bouncing checks, missing payments, borrowing money from a real loan shark? There’s nothing funny about that.