Ok… I trashed the original post.  Yep, completely (I found things that made some points potentially invalid, so I cleared it up).  See this is how it was… some people say employers doing credit checks hurt your credit score, others say it doesn’t.  Both say the inquiries are listed in your credit report (so yeah, two competitors could potentially see you applied for the other — like that’s going to help you).  But in the end it kind of falls into a simple thing, credit scores are spirals.  If you have good credit, you can get more; if you have bad, it’s only going to get worse without more effort than it took to get in that state (a single accident could trash your credit).

And in the end, it’s that simple thing that causes problems for everything.  You have to pay out more money if you have a bad credit score — so the people with less money have to pay even more.  Those with more money get discounts.  If you’ve got to pay more for the same things, it’s possible you’ll get further behind on some payments.  Then when a company does a check, what do they see?  Short credit history (if you closed accounts on your own of old accounts), late payments, etc.  So now they think you’re a lazy slob who can’t manage things.  Now you run the risk of not being hired (although they do have to tell you why if it’s because of the report — now if they do this….), or being hired and given less pay than you would’ve before, less chance for advancement/etc.