The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

The Dove in the Room
A new breed of anti-war Republican awaits its champion.

he good news for the GOP, where 2012 is concerned, is that the worsening economic outlook adds potency to attacks on President Obama over stimulus spending and unemployment. At the same time, in the fight over the deficit—a fight it started—its big idea, Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare, has become political kryptonite. Republicans need a new way to claim the responsibility mantle. As it happens, one such issue has been bubbling up from the party’s own membership: pragmatic isolationism.

From the House, where 87 Republicans voted for Dennis Kucinich’s resolution to end the military intervention in Libya, to the set of Morning Joe, whose titular host fulminates about “unwinnable wars,” conservatives are taming their inner hawks. In March, an Ipsos poll reported that 36 percent of Republicans favored cutting defense spending to bring down the federal deficit, just one percentage point fewer than the share preferring to wring the savings from Medicare and Medicaid. A Gallup survey after Osama bin Laden’s death had Republicans split (47 to 47) on whether the U.S. should withdraw from Afghanistan.

That some in the party of Robert Taft are staking out this ground isn’t so surprising. In a 1976 vice-presidential debate, Bob Dole infamously branded the World Wars “Democrat wars”; as a candidate, George W. Bush declared, “I’m not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it’s got to be.’ ” Considering how Bush’s world-historical flip-flop on that issue turned out, it’s little wonder Republicans are coming around to his original way of thinking.

There’s one potential GOP presidential aspirant, however, who may be up to the task. Once an avowed neocon, this prominent Republican recently outlined a new foreign-policy doctrine notable for its sense of restraint: “We should only commit our forces when clear and vital American interests are at stake. Period … We can’t fight every war, we can’t undo every injustice in the world.” You can practically see the campaign slogan, emblazoned across a bus as it leads reporters on a wild-goose chase: “Come home, America. Vote Palin.

The feds need to increase interest rates for savers, and reduce them for borrowers. Charging double-digit interest on credit cards should be outlawed when savers earn less than 1% (less after taxes). The government has created a stupid environment in this period of our economy. High interest rates are tantamount to higher taxes, and takes away from consumer purchasing power. All ass-backwards.

The economy is the reason interest rates are so low right now.

When the economy is weak, people and businesses are less inclined to borrow money. Like anything else, the cost of loans is affected by supply and demand, and low demand for loans means that the cost of loans — the interest rates — has come down.

Adding to this, the Federal Reserve has moved to lower interest rates. These actions range from lending money to banks at extremely low rates to buying bonds on the open market, which drives market interest rates lower. By lowering interest rates, the Fed hopes to stimulate the economy.

Their reasoning is that if loans are cheaper, more people and businesses will borrow, spending will rebound, and the economy will be on its way again. This hasn’t worked particularly well, however, because many people are already swamped with debt, and banks have been reluctant to lend money because they got burned in the housing crisis.
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/08/24/why-are-interest-rates-so-low-right-now-and-where-should-you-put-your-money/

Stop out-of-control credit card rates
By: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
May 18, 2010 05:11 AM EDT

As the Senate completes debate on historic Wall Street reform legislation, it needs to address a problem that has caused severe stress for so many American families: runaway interest rates on credit cards.

Credit card companies now charge rates that, until recently, would have been illegal in most states. Rates of up to 30 percent are not uncommon. Yet states are powerless to stop the practice.

Currently pending before the Senate is a bipartisan amendment to the Wall Street reform bill that would restore to the 50 states the power to protect their citizens from unscrupulous out-of-state lenders.

It would make clear that the interest limits of the consumer’s state govern all interstate consumer lending transactions — including credit card lending. If this amendment is passed, each state could again enforce interest rate limits against lenders doing business with its citizens.

It was not always like this: For the first 202 years of our republic, each state had the ability to enforce usury laws against any lender charging excessive rates. Then, an apparently minor 1978 Supreme Court decision changed everything.

In Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp., the Supreme Court interpreted the word “located” in the National Bank Act of 1863 to mean that in a transaction between a bank in one state and a consumer in another, the transaction is governed by laws of the bank’s state.

It did not take long before big banks saw the loophole. They could avoid interest rate restrictions, they realized, by reorganizing as “national banks” and moving to states with the worst consumer protections.

Sure enough, the credit card divisions of most major Wall Street banks today are based in just a few states. Consumers in all other states are denied the protection against outrageous interest rates and fees that states historically provided their citizens.

This offends not just justice but history. Protecting citizens against excessive interest rates has been a hallmark of civilized legal codes for millenniums — through the founding of our republic. But then the big banks’ crafty lawyers found this inadvertent loophole.

The amendment has been endorsed by groups on the front lines of consumer protection, like AARP, Common Cause, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Action, Consumers Union and the National Consumer Law Center (on behalf of its low-income clients). These organizations know the frustrations of fighting out-of-state credit card companies that have unilateral discretion to raise rates — often for any, or even no, reason.

Bolstering our system of federalism and restoring states’ rights to protect their citizens should have broad bipartisan appeal.

I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment.

What a blessing it would be to everyone if the tricks and traps in the fine print of credit card contracts no longer pitched American families into the quicksand of 30 percent and higher interest rates.

Let’s not pass up this opportunity to restore states’ rights to protect millions of Americans from inexcusable lending practices.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, is the junior senator from Rhode Island. He is the sponsor of Amendment 3746, which has 16 co-sponsors from both parties.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37375.html