> credit is the only way they're surviving on something close to minimum wage. Or credit was the only "safety net" they had during a rough time

In my experience, the average American has no concept of saving money, and those below average even less.

It's funny to me that America gets flak from all over the world for having no social safety net; if this was actually true, you'd expect to see people put aside a bit of their income, however meager it may be, out of an expectation that they will need it. What do you see in practice? You see people dashing over to the nearest rent-to-own rims shop. (If you don't know poor people, you may not know such businesses exist.)

> Almost none of these people have the kind of collateral needed to use credit to truly transform their lives, and the government assistance for that is seriously lacking in the US

I doubt that greater availability of credit, perhaps facilitated through government subsidy, is what precludes the majority of such people from transforming their lives.

You can't really survive on that. It's a snowballing situation. It's perhaps a strategy to avert impending catastrophe but it's like pitching an airplane down to gain speed when the engine is stalling. If it gets you to restart the engine the brief nosedive may let you survive, but if you have to keep turning the nose more and more vertical, the you're gonna meet the ground.

You need money to cover your expenses. Forgoing the rest of your salary is a very, very cheap form of leverage.

For the risk to make sense you probably do already need enough, though.