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10% Cap on Credit Cards?
00:13:12
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unidentified
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Strategist Chet Love and Democratic strategist Lucy Caldwell. | |
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're ready for a discussion on some of the proposals that President Trump has had to address affordability, including a potential 10% cap on credit card interest rates. | ||
| And for this conversation, we're joined by Brendan Peterson, who's a financial services reporter for Punch Bowl News. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you for having me, Kim. | ||
| And so, you know, the president did say that, you know, he wanted to address credit card debt. | ||
| I want to give you some numbers on that, which you're probably familiar with. | ||
| Credit card debt in the United States exceeds $1.21 trillion. | ||
| Average interest rate is at 22%. | ||
| The average credit card debt per American was over $6,000, $6,523 per American in 2025. | ||
| 37% of adults carry a balance on their credit cards. | ||
| So talk about this proposal from the president, what we know about it, and how it might affect those numbers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, the proposal, what you see is what you get. | |
| The president came out and announced, I want to say last Friday, that he wants to see credit card interest rates capped at 10%. | ||
| The White House has gotten a lot of follow-up questions about this proposal. | ||
| For example, like, do you need legislation? | ||
| The answer is almost certainly yes. | ||
| When I've heard Caroline Levitt talk about this proposal, I've heard her say, like, well, we're expecting the credit card companies to come out with products like this. | ||
| And we've seen some like marketing pushes along these lines. | ||
| There has been, I think the company built like, oh, yeah, 10% credit card, no problem. | ||
| That is an introductory rate, and it will eventually go up to something closer to 30% APR. | ||
| So like you're hearing noise about the president's proposal, but very little action happening so far. | ||
| What would it actually take though to implement something like this in terms of what goes into credit card rates and what it would take to lower them? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, again, it would certainly take an act of Congress at this point to institute some kind of larger cap. | ||
| And right now, leaders on the Hill, mostly Republicans, are saying maybe not, right? | ||
| There is some interest on Capitol Hill in changing some things about credit cards, but when you're thinking about a 10% cap when the rates are, like you said, closer to 22%, that is a pretty big intervention in credit card markets. | ||
| Now, I would not tell you that it's impossible to economically pull that off. | ||
| There's data out of Vanderbilt's, their policy accelerator, that has found that maybe a 15% credit card rate would be more, or cap, I should say, would be manageable without the kinds of like hair on fire risks that bankers will tell you there are as soon as you start talking about any kind of government price cap, price controls, right? | ||
| In theory, the bankers will tell you. | ||
| Once we start talking about credit card interest caps, the availability of credit goes down, which means that fewer people with worse credit scores are not going to be able to use that credit card. | ||
| And having a credit card is like a nice financial tool to have in your toolback. | ||
| Like, no one would dispute that. | ||
| But it's definitely on the margins that you can make changes. | ||
| I think talking about a 10% cap, that's a pretty serious intervention. | ||
| But above it, you can look on the margins and say, yeah, this is probably doable if there's political will for it, which, based on my conversations with lawmakers right now, isn't exactly there yet. | ||
| And there have been a couple of ideas floated in Congress to address credit card swipe fees, to address interest rates. | ||
| You had a post on X just about that that President Donald Trump appears to endorse the Credit Card Competition Act and gives an ada boy to Senator Roger Marshall. | ||
| The banks will not like this one bit. | ||
| President Trump said on True Social, everyone should support great Republican Senator Roger Marshall's Credit Card Competition Act in order to stop the out-of-control swipe fee rip-off. | ||
| Roger is a fantastic senator. | ||
| What would this legislation do and what other legislation may be in the works that might address credit cards in particular? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Credit Card Competition Act is a bill that is led by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Roger Marshall of Kansas. | ||
| It is probably the single most lobbied about bill as far as the banking sector is concerned over the last several years. | ||
| It's a swipe fee reform bill. | ||
| In the United States, swipe fees are pretty high, especially relative to our friends in Europe. | ||
| The average swipe fee, which I should explain, when you swipe your card or use a credit card in a transaction at a retailer, the retailer is paying a certain percentage fee to process that transaction with the credit card company, with that bank. | ||
| In this case, in this country, it is about 2%, a little up, a little down, depending on the merchant. | ||
| In Europe, it's capped at 0.2%. | ||
| So a lot of retailers for a lot of years have been complaining about just how much they are spending in swipe fees. | ||
| Those prices, in theory, are passed along to customers, right? | ||
| If you've been to like a mom-and-pop store in the last several years, you've probably seen like taped up front on the register saying credit card expenses, 4% charge, right? | ||
| They are trying to cover that margin. | ||
| That is a case where consumers are directly paying for that swipe fee. | ||
| What Roger Marshall and Dick Durbin have been trying to do for the last couple of years now is say, okay, we're not doing price caps. | ||
| This is not a like we're bringing a ceiling into swipe fees. | ||
| They want to introduce a requirement that credit card companies actually offer a cheaper payment processor in the matter of actually payment transactions. | ||
| Because right now, the credit card market is largely dominated by two big companies, Visa and MasterCard. | ||
| They move their prices in tandem. | ||
| You can dispute whether it is a duopoly, but it certainly has the qualities of like kind of a cartel. | ||
| And what they are arguing, Marshall and Durbin, is that if you just make the companies offer a cheaper company, prices could go down on swipe beats. | ||
| Let's get some actual economic competition in there. | ||
| Banks hate this for a lot of reasons. | ||
| And they'll say, look, Visa and MasterCard, we make a lot of money off this, but we also make our payment rails more secure. | ||
| And we offer these great credit card rewards. | ||
| Don't you like your credit card rewards? | ||
| It'd be a shame if something happened to your credit card rewards. | ||
| They love to say that. | ||
| At the end of the day, this is an economic intervention. | ||
| Credit card rewards, which we should say, are paid for by those swipe fees, by the interest paid by folks who don't pay off their cards every month, et cetera. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Like that, that is the transaction, the exchange that people get. | ||
| And I think some people like they look at credit card rewards, some of which can be very lucrative, sometimes more marginal. | ||
| And people wonder, like, where's this money actually coming from? | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| Is it swipe fees? | ||
| And is interest paid by the people who are not paying that maximum balance every single month, right? | ||
| That's the exchange. | ||
| That is the deal that we have made between banks, consumers, credit cards, and retailers. | ||
| It can change. | ||
| I want to talk about some of the president's other measures to address affordability, including, so we talked about that cap on credit card interest rates at 10%. | ||
| He's also suggesting a ban on institutional investors in the single-family home market. | ||
| He has suggested buying $200 billion in mortgage bonds to bring down housing costs, allowing 401k funds to be used for home down payments, which some people can already do. | ||
| in certain cases. | ||
| And Trump is expected to unveil a broader proposal on that at Davos next week. | ||
| How much impact do you think some of these measures would actually have on what people are calling this affordability crisis? | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| And the answer is like, I'm not totally sure. | ||
| I would say most experts aren't totally sure. | ||
| A lot of the devil is in the details on these proposals. | ||
| I'll just talk about the institutional investors proposal to ban them from buying single-family homes. | ||
| Nationally, if you zoom out, like a company like Blackstone has something like 1% of single-family homes nationwide, right? | ||
| That's not a huge supply, but it's also not nothing. | ||
| Where it gets interesting is when you look at more regional problems. | ||
| They own more housing stock in certain places. | ||
| And I remember this being a bigger problem in Ohio, for instance, when Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown was still in office, the senator, Democratic senator from Ohio, he introduced a bill that he said was targeted at predatory institutional investors buying homes in Ohio. | ||
| He gets knocked out of office by Bernie Moreno. | ||
| Bernie Moreno is now a senator on the Senate Banking Committee, Republican. | ||
| And as soon as Trump makes this announcement saying, hey, we want to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes, Bernie Moreno shows up, I have a bill for this, right? | ||
| So there is a bipartisan appetite. | ||
| You can see how Trump entering the space sort of opens the aperture, the Overton window, if you will, for doing this kind of analysis. | ||
| The Overton window being the sort of realm of acceptable ideas and policies that shifts over time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There is interest here. | ||
| And like a lot of things in housing policy specific, it's very local. | ||
| It's very regional, right? | ||
| The dynamics of like who the construction builders are, what your zoning regulations are, all of that is incredibly close in proximity, local politics. | ||
| So to some extent, there's less things that Congress can do in a lot of ways, but that's not something folks from trying. | ||
| There's another bill in the Senate right now called the Road to Housing Act, which is led by Elizabeth Warren, one of the top progressives, and Tim Scott, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. | ||
| Those two do not agree on a lot, but they do have the Road to Housing Act, which would generally try to make it easier for developers to build, reducing some key regulations about manufactured housing policy and getting rid of the steel chassis, for instance, which is something that was kind of a holdover for when homes had to be driven from manufacturer to home. | ||
| Now a lot of homes can be built on site. | ||
| That's something that could save thousands of dollars per home. | ||
| It's a lot of small interventions like that. | ||
| That's a big one that's coming down the pipe. | ||
| I want to follow up on your point about Elizabeth Warren and the president kind of lining up with someone who's been a very traditional opponent. | ||
| The story about this in NBC News, Trump turns to progressives for ideas on affordability. | ||
| The president called Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, on Monday, and she said they discussed legislation to cap credit card interest rate. | ||
| It feels almost unreal in the environment that we're in to hear about this kind of communication on an issue. | ||
| What's unique about this? | ||
| There's a lot of things unique about this. | ||
| For one, the day that Warren gets this call from Trump, and I should say it was an unscheduled call, she told reporters that it just came from a 202 number in the Washington area. | ||
| She almost didn't pick up because she had no reason to believe that it was the President of the United States who was calling her. | ||
| But earlier that day, she had given a speech about basically economic populism and calling on her fellow Democrats to embrace this economic populist wind that has sort of gotten picked up by the Trump administration. | ||
| She's telling Democrats, hey, let's not worry so much about our corporate donors anymore. | ||
| Let's dig in on populism. | ||
| She gives that speech, and then an hour or two later, she gets a call from the President of the United States. | ||
| She says she talked to him both about the Road to Housing Act, which almost got included in the annual defense policy package last December and it was eventually stripped out. | ||
| And she also talked to him about credit cards and credit card rates, saying that we could reduce those rates if the president, Trump, delivered and actually put his political will behind it. | ||
| So, on the one hand, it is a remarkable story because the two of them do not agree on a lot. | ||
| Every now and again, Trump will say something supportive and then he'll come back and say something like sort of racially charged about her. | ||
| Like it's a little bit of a mess, but it will show you that Trump will cut a deal with anybody. | ||
| Like Trump is politically, ideologically agnostic in a way that I think we lose track of in the day-to-day like churn of DC politics. | ||
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Credit Card Interest Rates Debate
00:15:52
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| All right. | ||
| Well, we're going to be taking questions for Brendan Peterson of Punch Bowl News. | ||
| Our phone lines are going to be regional for this segment. | ||
| If you're in the Eastern or Central time zone, call 202-748-8000 in the Mountain or Pacific time zone, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Again, you can text us at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Just let us know your name and where you're from. | ||
| Let's start with Thomas in Smithfield, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Thomas. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Good morning, everybody. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Yeah, I think the 10% rate is a fair rate considering that a lot of people use credit. | ||
| And for banks to have an extortion or a loan shark rate of 15, 20, 25% is rather excessive. | ||
| And you touched on the transaction fees on top of that that the retailer absorbs. | ||
| But what we have to remember is the economy is based on consumption. | ||
| And I think there's a level of responsibility to the credit card companies offering easy credit for qualified people. | ||
| And it's like selling candy on the corner there. | ||
| People are going to take that, you know, and it's a false sense of entrapment. | ||
| And so my question to Brandon is: do you think the banks should lower their rates, which I believe they do? | ||
| And, you know, the marketing that they do is kind of an entrapment, but then people fall for that trap. | ||
| And the other thing, Touchy, you touched on mortgages there. | ||
| I really think the whole financial industry should look at mortgages and look at the amortization tables and see how they're weigh leveraged towards the banks where your principal payment and your interest payment, your interest is a fraction of what your principal payment is up front. | ||
| And that's why you have to have a 50-year mortgage, what they're entertaining. | ||
| So I think the industry look at the industry as the overall general functioning of the economy. | ||
| Credit is easily. | ||
| So, Thomas, I just want to make sure that we're getting the questions you want Brendan to address. | ||
| It's about the banks and the rates that they set more broadly, and then about housing affordability and sort of how mortgage rates are amortized over time, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| Okay, go ahead, Brendan. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So on the credit card piece, let me just say this. | ||
| Credit cards have never been more profitable for the banking industry. | ||
| Like in the last 10 years, we have seen a pretty significant uptilt in exactly how much profit that banks get. | ||
| They call it the APR margin. | ||
| It's like 14.3% today, according to the latest data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has a lot of credit card data, if you're interested in looking at it yourself. | ||
| That's up from about like 8% 10 years ago. | ||
| And so like when you think about who is making money off of credit cards, and I should also say like part of the reason that APRs and other things in the credit card market have become more expensive is because federal interest rates have gone up. | ||
| The prime rate has gone up because of higher inflation in the economy. | ||
| This is just part of the pandemic era economy that is still working its way through. | ||
| But at the same time, banks have created an engine with credit cards that are still very, very profitable despite those higher costs. | ||
| On mortgages, yes, you mentioned the 50-year mortgage, and we haven't heard about it as much recently since the president first sort of tweeted an image of him and FDR on a piece of poster board with FDR, 30-year mortgage, Trump, 50-year mortgage. | ||
| You're exactly right that like a 50-year mortgage is really, really difficult to pay off in the long term. | ||
| I have had many an expert refer to it as debt slavery to me as I've been talking to them about this. | ||
| 30-year mortgage is kind of a sweet spot. | ||
| And if you can get a 20-year mortgage, if you have that kind of capital, it's even a little bit easier to pay it off as long as you can pay that rate. | ||
| There's not a lot of serious interest in a 50-year mortgage, I think, because the politics of it are pretty dicey. | ||
| You mentioned the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had all that credit card data that you were referencing. | ||
| But in response to some of Trump's affordability proposals, including that cap on credit card interest rates, there's been a lot of pushback from Democrats that the CFPB was literally working to improve affordability to rein in credit card companies. | ||
| And the Trump administration, as part of its doge cuts, has made significant cuts to that agency. | ||
| How do you think that this plays into sort of the overall affordability narrative that the administration is trying to prose? | ||
| That's a great question, especially on the narrative itself. | ||
| I think it has definitely hurt the Trump administration's case. | ||
| And when you talk to progressives on the Hill, like Senator Bernie Sanders, for instance, who has his own 10% interest rate cap bill for credit cards, they just don't believe that the president is serious about this. | ||
| And a lot of that has to do with the ways in which they have gutted the CFPB. | ||
| The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in its history before being mostly largely shut down in the early months of the Trump administration, they saved consumers $20 billion. | ||
| That is a huge sum of money. | ||
| A lot of that in like going after predatory lenders, people who are doing unfair debt collection practices. | ||
| There's a lot of good things the CFPB did. | ||
| And they were summarily shut down by Russ Vogt, who is technically the acting director of the CFPB, as well as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| It's bad politics for them. | ||
| The CFPB was maybe the most popular federal agency. | ||
| If people knew what it was, I would say that it doesn't have the best PR in the world, in part because the banking industry despised the CFPB. | ||
| They really didn't like how it worked, especially under the Biden administration when it was led by Rohit Chopra, who had a very muscular understanding of what the CFPB could do. | ||
| He pushed very hard within the regulatory framework to make credit more accessible, but also like cracking down on bank practices and the practices of other non-bank lenders. | ||
| So it doesn't help. | ||
| The CFPB is still cooking. | ||
| I will also say that we saw a pretty significant change in the CFPB's budget during Republican reconciliation. | ||
| The one big, beautiful bill that came through not too long ago. | ||
| Senate banking Republicans and Republicans in the House Financial Services Committee successfully cut the CFPB's long-term budget in half by going into their statute and saying, okay, the CFPB is allowed to get 12% of the Fed's budget every year. | ||
| We're going to make that 6%, 6.5%. | ||
| That's going to be a really significant cut, not now, because the CFPB is not taking in all that much money. | ||
| Russ Vogt has only asked for, I want to say, $145 million in budget this year, whereas under the Biden years, they were approaching $70,080, $900 million. | ||
| A future Democratic administration is going to have a CFPB budget that's basically cut in half. | ||
| And that will also have an impact on consumers. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go to John in Chicago. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Hey, really love the show. | ||
| You know, I'm sort of an old school capitalist guy, and, you know, all the talk about forcing companies to do this and that. | ||
| I've always wondered why we just couldn't force good old old school capitalism into this mix. | ||
| And I think we'd have a lot of brilliant business people getting into the credit card business that would bring chaos to the market and change. | ||
| I think that's fair. | ||
| And I think when you have something like the Trump administration that's coming out and saying, like, lower this, cap this, like, you're going to have, even before the government takes any formal responses, private actors in that market are going to try to capitalize on that. | ||
| Like, I mentioned at the top of the hour that BILT, this credit card company, B-I-L-T, introduced a 10% card rate. | ||
| That will, it's an introductory rate. | ||
| It will get lower over time. | ||
| Get higher or lower? | ||
| Sorry, get higher over time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's just good old-fashioned marketing, right? | ||
| There are certainly opportunities. | ||
| And we could see credit card companies like make their whole thing like, hey, we have cheaper APR than those guys, right? | ||
| That's a possibility. | ||
| But again, you have to remember these are profit-seeking actors and they are going to try to maximize their profits. | ||
| I was saying to Kimberly before we started the show, I didn't realize that in the last couple of years, just between 2022 and 2024, the amount of just interest being paid by U.S. consumers on their credit card bills has gotten a lot higher. | ||
| In 2022, they were paying $105 billion as a collective in the United States. | ||
| In 2024, just two years later, that number had jumped to $160 billion, which is an increase of more than 52%, just an interest. | ||
| And so, like, I'm not someone who is religiously following what exactly his APR credit card is. | ||
| I think that's most people. | ||
| People are paying a lot of money on this that they might not be paying attention to. | ||
| And that's, I think, where like the kind of capitalism hits the rubber of the road. | ||
| When people don't realize how much they're spending, it's easier for a free market to take advantage of that. | ||
| Connie is in Ambler, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Connie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| Well, no, more of a statement. | ||
| It's interesting that you're saying that Trump went to Elizabeth Warren for these ideas. | ||
| Isn't it interesting that there are Democratic ideas that are really better covering what we need to do in this state than the Republican ideas because they have no ideas, no ideas on health care, no ideas on credit card. | ||
| So tell me, really, who is helping the American people? | ||
| Not the Republicans. | ||
| I think it's a very good point that the president is embracing these Democratic ideas. | ||
| I think the credit card interest rate is a good one. | ||
| I should also say there have been populists in the Republican Party who have been saying this kind of thing too. | ||
| Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri, has also thrown his support behind a 10% credit card interest rate cap. | ||
| He is also supportive of the Durban-Marshall, or has at least in the past, been supportive of the Durban-Marshall credit card swipe fee bill. | ||
| So it's not like Republicans don't have anybody in the mix who are doing this. | ||
| But Elizabeth Warren, to your point, is the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. | ||
| She is easily the most influential Democrat in the Senate on economic policy, except for maybe Chuck Schumer, who is the leader of the Senate. | ||
| And she has a lot of sway with the Democratic Party establishment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So your point is well taken. | |
| Connie, excuse me, Connie also mentioned health care and that whether or not the Republicans have ideas on health care. | ||
| I should point out that Trump actually laid out a new framework this week to address health care costs. | ||
| This is a story in Axios. | ||
| Trump on Thursday called on Congress to pass a package of measures aimed at lowering drug prices, insurance premiums, and increasing health cost transparency. | ||
| The great health care plan is a response to Democrats' attacks around expired Affordable Care Act subsidies and an acknowledgement the GOP could get blamed for health care affordability heading into the midterm elections. | ||
| I mean, what should we take from the fact that this health care plan is coming out now, that these credit card ideas are coming out now, all of which probably need Congress to do something? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Affordability is a big deal. | ||
| You know, it is something that even as inflation, we haven't even talked about inflation numbers recently. | ||
| Like inflation annually right now is like 2.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. | ||
| That's certainly not as high as it was during the Biden years coming out of the pandemic, but it is also much higher than inflation was in the years leading up to the pandemic. | ||
| Rates were near zero for a very long time, so much so that like people were literally writing think pieces about like what happens if inflation never comes back, right? | ||
| Like it was a funny, weird time. | ||
| So I was thinking about this on the way into C-SPAN today. | ||
| Like people are experiencing higher costs everywhere in their lives. | ||
| They are clocking it kind of everywhere they go. | ||
| For instance, I was at the grocery store yesterday and I saw a bag of Doritos going for like $8. | ||
| And I could remember when I first moved to DC, that was a $4 bag. | ||
| And that is just something that happens after several years of elevated inflation. | ||
| To your point about all the policies that are coming hurtling out of the Trump administration right now, yeah, it does look like this is an administration that is pretty worried about what the economy is doing to its base. | ||
| And you have to remember that Biden was arguably washed out of office, or I should say Harris lost after being associated with Biden because of inflation, because of high cost politics. | ||
| We saw worldwide incumbents after the pandemic get washed out of office, and the consistent thread from all these voters and all these surveys and polls was inflation. | ||
| The Trump administration does not want a repeat of that, especially when the president himself has historically had very good branding and polling associated with his economic policy. | ||
| That has always been his strongest suit. | ||
| And he is now deeply underwater with voters on the economy. | ||
| Like, I think the lowest he was ever underwater with voters in the economy was like maybe 9% on net in his first administration. | ||
| He is easily in the double digits now. | ||
| I want to say it's closer to 20 or 30 points underwater, but I haven't seen the most recent polling. | ||
| Suffice to say it is bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is bad. | |
| All right. | ||
| Let's hear from Evelyn in Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Evelyn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I just want to make a quick statement and a question. | ||
| One thing that it seems hasn't been mentioned is that the United States Supreme Court successfully destroyed usury laws that the states had in place back in the 1978 in the Market Bank versus First Omaha decision. | ||
| Once that decision was issued by the United States Supreme Court, interest rates on credit cards skyrocketed. | ||
| They effectively destroyed the state's usury laws. | ||
| And Congress has been complacent. | ||
| I almost feel as an American that they're on the take because this should have never happened. | ||
| This ruling should have been overturned. | ||
| And I applaud President Trump for trying to do what he's doing. | ||
| And I'll listen to you on there. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's true that the national economy has really changed in the wake of that decision and others. | ||
| There's been a longer running trend. | ||
| We're getting into like my favorite like bank regulatory stuff. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| There's been a lot of big changes in how like states and the federal government split their supervision of like federal law. | ||
|
Federal Preemption Battles
00:03:09
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| And you're right. | ||
| Like the pendulum has swung very far in the nature of the federal government. | ||
| There's a lot of preemption of state law. | ||
| And this is something that we're still fighting about. | ||
| There have been Supreme Court cases in the last couple of years that have looked at like the ability of states like California and Illinois to try to like reduce all kinds of like specific banking practices. | ||
| And the Supreme Court continues in general to side with the feds on this. | ||
| It is just a long-running trend of allowing Congress to regulate commerce. | ||
| And I don't see it changing anytime soon. | ||
| Absent, to your point, a major change in congressional law. | ||
| We're not there yet. | ||
| But listen, this is a pretty topsy-turvy time in American politics. | ||
| Like I can squint and I can see it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, we're going to end it there. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Brendan Peterson is the financial services reporter for Punch Bowl News. | ||
| Really appreciate your time and coming in this morning. | ||
| Thanks, Kimberly. | ||
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Coming up shortly here on C-SPAN, we'll take you to Richmond, Virginia, where Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger will be sworn in as the state's first woman governor. | |
| Her running mate, Ghazala Hashmi, will become the state's first Muslim lieutenant governor. | ||
| And Democrat Jay Jones will assume his position as the state's first black attorney general. | ||
| The ceremony is set to begin at 12 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Be sure to follow our live coverage right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. | ||
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
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In a divided media world, one place brings Americans together. | |
| According to a new MAGA research report, nearly 90 million Americans turn to C-SPAN, and they're almost perfectly balanced. | ||
| 28% conservative, 27% liberal or progressive, 41% moderate. | ||
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| Unfiltered every day on the C-SPAN networks. | ||
| We bring you into the chamber, onto the Senate floor, inside the hearing room, up to the mic, and to the desk in the Oval Office. | ||
|
Live Within Your Means
00:03:24
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C-SPAN takes you where decisions are made. | |
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in open forum ready to take your calls. | ||
| Democrats at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let's start with Bob in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
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Yeah, I think credit cards are evil for most people. | |
| The basic rule should be if you don't have the money, don't spend it. | ||
| I mean, you swipe that card, charge it, put it on credit. | ||
| And I don't know, I guarantee you'll go into debt and it'll spiral out of control. | ||
| So why risk the trap? | ||
| Live within your means, use cash or debit, and avoid the headaches. | ||
| Bob, if you don't mind me asking, do you have any credit cards? | ||
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Yes, but I pay, I have a USAA credit card and I pay it off every month. | |
| I just use it as basically a master card. | ||
| I mean, as a banking card. | ||
| I'm curious why you don't use cash yourself or just sort of, you know, use a debit card. | ||
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Because I've had it for over 30 years and I get some rewards back, so they're actually losing money on me. | |
| I don't pay interest. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How would you feel? | ||
| I mean, because as we were talking with our last guest, there have been some efforts to, you know, change the swipe fees and things like that, which the banking companies say would potentially risk people's rewards programs. | ||
| I understand that you don't like the idea of credit cards, but use this for the rewards. | ||
| What would you think of legislation that might reduce those swipe fees or put other limitations on interest rates for credit cards, but might endanger those rewards that you get? | ||
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Well, I would just stop using it then. | |
| I'm not looking at it as an individual thing. | ||
| I'm looking at it as a whole. | ||
| I mean, millions of people are stuck carrying month after month debt. | ||
| I mean, they got, what, balances, $10,000, $12,000, and, you know, it's like endless interest payments, like you're just working just to pay the banks. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You don't have the money, don't spend it, I guess. | ||
| I think it's anti-capitalist, the whole credit card system, if you ask me. | ||
| Well, let's now go to Faye in Ithaca, New York on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Faye. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| I have a number of comments. | ||
| First of all, I want to say to the Jeffrey Epstein survivors that you're not forgotten, that there are people out there that want the Epstein files to come out entirely, and we're rooting for you and keep the faith. | ||
|
PBS Off the Air
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And the other thing is Bob Reiner, when he passed away and Trump said that he was deranged, was unbelievably insensitive. | |
| I was horrified by that. | ||
| And also when Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Trump said that the Epstein survivors don't have the honor to meet with him. | ||
| I mean, what let's talk about who's deranged. | ||
| I mean, it it's it's it it's the um the woman that that came to the White House from Venezuela who won the Nobel Peace Prize and gave him her her award. | ||
| I mean, how deranged is that? | ||
| What more does this country need to see that there's a real problem mentally and spiritually with the leader of this country? | ||
| I mean, first of all, Mar-a-Lago is not the White House. | ||
| We choose a president so they are in the White House. | ||
| That's where the work gets done. | ||
| Taxpayers are paying for the airplane and the security to constantly be going to Mar-a-Lago, constantly going to golf clubs. | ||
| I mean, then there's all the money the Trump family is making. | ||
| I mean, it goes on and on and on. | ||
| And when you have callers saying, oh, you know, I'm tired of hearing people call in and bashing Trump. | ||
| I don't want to bash anybody. | ||
| I want the truth. | ||
| PBS News Hour Weekend is now off the air. | ||
| They don't have the funding. | ||
| This administration took that away. | ||
| The news media is exceptional, okay? | ||
| PBS, BBC, C-SPAN, and there's others, okay? | ||