■ West Wing Week : 03 / 27 / 2015 or,
“ The Magic Page ”
This week,
the President welcomed to the White House
both student filmmakers and student scientists,
hosted the Afghan president,
and honored
the five year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act,
while the First Lady championed the
Let Girls Learn initiative in Japan and Cambodia.
That's March 20th to March 26th or,
" The Magic Page ."
■ Weekly Address :
Protecting Working Americans’ Paychecks
In this week’s address,
the President highlighted the progress
made protecting American consumers
since he signed Wall Street reform
into law five years ago,
including an important new step
taken by
the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
earlier this week
toward preventing abuses in payday lending.
The President emphasized his commitment
to fighting to advance middle - class economics
and ensure
everybody who works hard can get ahead,
while opposing attempts by Republicans
both to weaken the CFPB
and give large tax breaks
to the wealthiest Americans
at the expense of the middle class.
- Transcript -
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
Weekly Address: Protecting Working Americans’ Paychecks
WASHINGTON, DC — In this week’s address, the President highlighted the progress made protecting American consumers since he signed Wall Street Reform into law five years ago, including an important new step taken by the independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau earlier this week toward preventing abuses in payday lending. The President emphasized his commitment to fighting to advance middle-class economics and ensure everybody who works hard can get ahead, while opposing attempts by Republicans both to weaken the CFPB and give large tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans at the expense of the middle class.
The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, March 28, 2015.
Remarks of President Barack Obama
Weekly Address
The White House
March 28, 2015
Hi, everybody. Five years ago, after the worst financial crisis in decades, we passed historic Wall Street reform to end the era of bailouts and too big to fail.
As part that reform, we created an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with one mission: to protect American consumers from some of the worst practices of the financial industry.
They’ve already put $5 billion back in the pockets of more than 15 million families. And this week, they took an important first step towards cracking down on some of the most abusive practices involving payday loans.
Millions of Americans take out these loans every year. In Alabama, where I visited this week, there are four times as many payday lending stores as there are McDonald’s. But while payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt. If you take out a $500 loan, it’s easy to wind up paying more than $1,000 in interest and fees.
The step the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced this week is designed to change that. The idea is pretty common sense: if you’re a payday lender preparing to give a loan, you should make sure that the borrower can afford to pay it back first.
As Americans, we believe there’s nothing wrong with making a profit. But there is something wrong with making that profit by trapping hard-working men and women in a vicious cycle of debt.
Protecting working Americans’ paychecks shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But the budget Republicans unveiled last week would make it harder, not easier, to crack down on financial fraud and abuse. And this week, when Republicans rolled out their next economic idea, it had nothing to do with the middle class. It was a new, more-than-$250 billion tax cut for the top one-tenth of the top one percent of Americans. That would mean handing out an average tax cut of $4 million a year to just 4,000 Americans per year, and leaving the rest of the country to pay for it.
I don’t think our top economic priority should be helping a tiny number of Americans who are already doing extraordinarily well, and asking everybody else to foot the bill. I think our top priority should be helping everybody who works hard get ahead. This country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.
That’s what middle-class economics is all about, and as long as I’m your President, that’s what I’ll keep on fighting to do.
Thanks, and have a great weekend.