Flashback: excellent speech on Senate floor by Kerry on fiscal responsibility

[ProSense]

An old fashioned value: Fiscal Responsibility

In a time when the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility dominate the news, this video from JKmediasouce.org of a Senate Speech that John Kerry gave on November 17, 2004 when raising the debt ceiling was being debated hints at how different the present would be had the results 2 weeks before been different. The speech speaks of the responsibility of Congress to be fiscally responsible.

He speaks of the result of a borrow and spend policy that President Bush had in his first term. He says that because of it we were in a hole that we had to work our way out of. He spoke of how the Congress was “putting the tab on the credit card and sending the bill to our kids.” He said that this was not sustainable and was depriving us of being able to make choices that we should make for our country. He makes the case that debt has consequences were beyond the obvious economic ones They make us a weaker country.

The speech has a sense of old fashion responsibility that reminds me of what I was taught by my parents . It also reflects the values that Senator Kerry spoke of even as he ran for President. It is interesting to find that in 2004, he added a plank to the Democratic platform to deal with credit card and mortgage abuses.

The contrast this year to John McCain, who still calls for more tax cuts in addition to retaining the Bush tax cuts that are less affordable now than they were then, couldn’t be more extreme. On this as on other things, he would be a disastrous third term of George Bush.

(Video)

The values that Senator Kerry speaks of are values that are reflected throughout his political career. He speaks of having been one of the Senators who worked for fiscal responsibility in the 1990s. It may be ironic that the two votes the Republicans used to claim Senator Kerry flipped flopped, in fact, demonstrated his consistency on financial issues. The votes were votes of principle, he thought then, as he said then that it was wrong to increase the debt to pay for the costs of the war rather than to roll back tax cuts to the wealthy. This brilliant speech outlines the need to act responsibly and is even more compelling now than it was when it was given.

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1. Kerry specifically added oversight of banking institutions to Dem platform in 2004.

The corporate media is complicit in the financial crisis....they deliberately focused on lies against Kerry than on the truth about the issues that protect the US citizen and consumer that Kerry has been fighting for his entire time in public life.



August 27, 2004
THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM; Kerry Sees Credit Card Abuses, And Promises Steps to End Them
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Senator John Kerry added a plank to his platform yesterday, promising to push for legislation that would curb what his campaign describes as abusive practices in credit card and mortgage lending.

The proposals coincided with the announcement of new Census Bureau data showing that family and household income, adjusted for inflation, had fallen over the first three years of the Bush administration. The decline came as consumer debt rose, and the new plank promised relief for wage earners in straitened circumstances.

''Abusive lending practices can take a huge bite out of the incomes of families who are working and can barely pay their credit card bills,'' Robert Gordon, Mr. Kerry's director of domestic policy, said.

Companies that issue credit cards, mainly banks, often double the interest rates if a cardholder is late with a monthly payment or the holder's creditworthiness is challenged. Mr. Kerry would require notice before each rate increase and limit the increase to a few percentage points.

''There is no proportionality now in these increases,'' Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to Mr. Kerry, said. ''They can go from 8 to 28 percent.''

A Kerry administration ''would ask Congress to legislate standards and to direct the Federal Trade Commission and bank regulators to impose regulations consistent with those standards,'' Mr. Sperling said. Much of this would be achieved through amendments to the Truth in Lending Act, he and Mr. Gordon said.

Credit card lenders would also be required to disclose, in prominent type on bills, how long it would take to pay off a debt, and the cost in interest if the card holder made only minimum monthly payments.

A California law imposed this standard, but credit card issuers challenged it in court in 2002, and the Bush administration's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency sided with the issuers. The comptroller argued that only federal regulators could impose such a restriction on nationally chartered banks and that his office did not plan to do so. The state lost the case.

Mr. Gordon said that some minimum payments were so low that they barely kept up with interest costs or fell behind them, in which case the balance could never be repaid.

Other changes proposed by the Kerry campaign would require lenders to forgo penalty charges when they allowed card holders to go beyond their borrowing caps. A cardholder with a $5,000 credit limit, for example, can face a penalty for reaching $5,200 even if the card company approved the charge that put the total over $5,000.

Mr. Kerry's principal mortgage proposal would prohibit lenders from using balloon mortgages in most subprime loans, which often go to low-income people at higher rates.

[ProSense]

2. The impact of nearly

eight years of Bush.

[politicasista]

3. K&R

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