Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to say a few words on the amendment I have pending and that we will be voting on in the next 2 days that will restore the historic power of States to control interest rates they charge to their citizens. One of the things I hear most about when I am home in Rhode Island is from folks who can't understand why their credit card interest rate suddenly jumped to over 30 percent. For a long time, the tricks and the traps in those long credit card contracts pitched people into these penalty rates. I think a lot of people don't read all the fine print and aren't sure exactly what it means. We have individual consumers up against the craftiest lawyers the credit card industry can hire, and the result is when they trigger one of these traps and they get caught by one of these little tricks, they end up being kicked into a very high penalty rate. Recently, after the credit card reform bill passed a year ago, we saw the credit card industry actually not even waiting for the tricks or traps to be triggered. They just began to spontaneously raise people's interest rates; again, very often over 30 percent. The Presiding Officer and I are both of an age where we can remember a time when interest rates of that level would have been a matter to refer to the authorities, not a commonplace business practice of our biggest industries.…”