@peterbautista I could see needing something like that if you have no friends and no community, but the poor people I've known and polled would borrow from a friend rather than take out extremely expensive short term debt, would get a bank account, etc.
A lot of this feels to me like "making poor decisions can have really bad consequences if you're poor and sort of doesn't have consequences at all if you're middle class", which seems quite different from Vimes' boots, IMO.