Let's say you're down on your luck, and you need a few bucks to get you through the month. Maybe your car broke down or your medical bills are too high.

Like many Americans, you have bad credit, and a traditional bank wouldn't lend you money on a bet. Besides, who goes to a bank for a measly $500?

You've driven by the flashy "Qwik Cash" or other payday loan signs. You've seen their advertisements with the nice people inside the stores willing to give you a loan to tide you over as long as you have a paycheck coming soon.

You're ready to take the plunge, except for this: It turns out your paycheck is from a less-than-savory source. And you don't really want the people there to have your personal information. A lot of folks are worried about identity theft these days.

So you ask a simple question.

"Can I have a loan if I don't tell you the source of my funds or my name?"

The nice people at the payday loan office politely ask you not to let the door hit you on the way out.

That's precisely what voters should tell the payday loan industry as it tries to pull a similar fast one on Missourians.

Last year, after yet another Missouri legislative session came and went without decreasing the interest rates that payday loan companies can charge their clients, a group of religious and civic organizations filed a state ballot initiative to bring sanity to the marketplace.

Missouri is one of the nation's most powerful magnets for payday loan companies. Its notoriously weak laws allow profiteers to prey on the working poor by charging effective annual interest rates of up 1,980 percent.

The payday loan companies and their cousins in the consumer credit industry want to keep that gravy train running on time.

They've created two campaign committees with hundreds of thousands of dollars — most of it given secretly — to fight off a ballot measure that is nearly identical to the one Congress passed to limit the ability of payday loan companies to bankrupt our nation's servicemen and women.

The payday loan companies don't want Missourians to have those same federal protections. And they won't even tell you that face to face.

What cowards.

One committee, laughably named Missourians for Equal Credit Opportunity, has raised $850,000 by funneling donations through a nonprofit called Missourians for Responsible Government. This is the same Kansas City-based group that let itself be used as a vessel for hundreds of thousands of dollars from anonymous sources to attack the independence of Missouri's judiciary. That effort failed. This one should, too.

Another committee, Stand Up Missouri, has taken in about $200,000 from companies in Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Oklahoma. It's no wonder those donors want to see Missouri's usury laws remain among the weakest in the land. Each of those four states has significantly lower effective APRs on payday loans than does Missouri. To them, Missouri is the Show-Me-the-Money state.

That campaign finance law allows such charlatans to hide behind layers of secrecy is almost as unjust as state laws that allow payday lenders to entrap vulnerable citizens with promises too good to be true.

But one ballot initiative at a time.