If you’ve ever driven a car in America, chances are you’ve been hit with a ticket of some kind at least once. For most of us, it’s little more than an inconvenient hassle that involves paying a fine and showing up for a court date. But, as John Oliver explained on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, for many of the country’s poorest — which happens to be a lot of people — municipal violations like speeding can actually be debilitating once unpaid fees start piling up. Even worse? As Oliver and other reporters have uncovered, most states rely on those fees as a “cash machine†for local districts, creating a system that sets people up for failure that Oliver calls the “fuck barrel.†And though Oliver doesn’t offer any ideas for how to escape the fuck barrel, he’s at least come up with the perfect hashtag for the cause: #ShutDownTheFuckBarrel.
John Oliver Breaks Down the Real Reason Speeding Tickets Are the Worst
