So Much For the GOP's Love of America's Military Men and Women
Military families will be exposed to predatory car loans and payday lenders for another year unless a little-noticed provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is stripped out of the bill during a House Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday.
Majority Republicans quietly inserted language into the gigantic defense legislation that would override a Pentagon push to enhance consumer protections for men and women in uniform. Flaws in the current rules have allowed lenders to trap military families in loans that cost two, five, and even ten times as much to repay as what the loan was actually worth.
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Beyond those abstract costs, individual horror stories abound, according to separate research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). A military spouse in Illinois was charged $5,700 by a title loan company after taking out a car title loan that was less than half that size. A soldier in Texas who borrowed less than $700 ended up paying back $2,000 on the loan because it was designed to skirt the MLA rules. The CFPB’s report spells out how military families are victimized by high-cost financial products that fall just outside the narrow confines of the current regulations.
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Duckworth’s amendment succeeded by a slim margin, 32-30, and the Heck provision to delay the new lending protections was stripped from the NDAA. 30 out of the committee’s 37 Republican members voted against the Duckworth amendment, and five sided with Democrats.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/04/29/3652482/predatory-lenders-military-house-trickery/