Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads, The Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neurolink. And I'm your host, Will Walden.
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notes. You, Mr. President, the bill
that Senate Republicans have brought to the floor today and
which we will vote on sometime soon is the latest example of
the great betrayal in action on the campaign trail.
Candidate Donald Trump promised that he was going to help
Americans deal with their pocketbook issues, kitchen table
issues. And he said that on day one, day
one, he is going to bring prices down, that he was going to bring
down costs for American families.
Well, Mr. President, up and President Trump and Republicans
are taking actions that will raise those costs on the
American people even further. And today's bill is exhibit AI.
Want to take a step back and put this bill that we're considering
today in context. You know, one of the fury, one
of the infuriating experiences that so many American consumers
have is the mountain of junk fees that they face.
These are hidden fees that are sometimes in very fine print and
contracts. They're all these fees that get
added to their bills where they really have no idea what
additional value they're getting for those fees because often
there is no additional value for that fee or that the additional
value is miniscule in comparison to the fee that they're being
charged. And so people pay these fees and
grind their teeth and essentially get ripped off.
We also see many predatory lending practices where
financial interests prey on those who are living paycheck to
paycheck. So years ago, after the
financial crisis of 2008, Congress created the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, also known by its shorthand
CFPB, to help protect American consumers from a whole range of
predatory practices. Now, Senator Warren was one of
the people who thought of establishing that important
consumer protection agency. Now she's the ranking Democrat
on the Banking and Housing Committee, on which I'm
privileged to serve. And since its creation, the CFPB
has gone after all sorts of fraudsters, all sorts of con
artists, all sorts of people who try to find different ways to
cheat American consumers out of their hard earned money.
And they've been successful, The Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, they've returned over $21 billion to American
consumers who'd been cheating, cheated out of their hard earned
money. In other words, they brought
lawsuits to go after these fraudsters or change practices
in order to make sure that people could keep more of their
hard earned money. And that includes $71,000,000
that were returned to my constituents in the state of
Maryland who are ripped off along the way.
The CFPB made some powerful enemies, and many Republicans
have been trying to dismantle the CFPB for years.
Now they have Elon Musk to help do their dirty work.
And in one of the most corrupt bargains in American history,
Elon Musk spent $280 million to help elect Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump has turned around and given Elon Musk the
keys to many federal agencies. And make no mistake, this has
nothing to do with making the federal government more
efficient and everything to do with rigging the government to
serve people like Elon Musk at the expense of everybody else in
America. In fact, one of the great
examples of that is that they went right after the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. I find it just gross that the
richest man in the world would go after a Bureau whose purpose
it is to help return money to American consumers who've been
cheated out of their hard earned dollars.
But that was one of the very early targets of Elon Musk and
his doge cronies. Now, apparently that wasn't
enough. It's not enough just to go after
and try to dismantle that agency.
The next step, and the one we're dealing with here in the Senate
today, is an effort to go back and undo some of the important
consumer protections that the CFPB put in place under the
Biden administration. One of those protections was a
rule that's in place now to prevent banks from charging
consumers exorbitant fees when a consumer overdraws their account
balances using a debit card. So how does this work?
Well, let's say you've got your debit card.
You go into the grocery store, you're going to buy some
groceries for the family, use your debit card, debit card to
pay, and you overdraw your account.
Now, some of the biggest banks in the country will typically
charge you $35 for each of those overdrafts, no matter how big
your overdraft amount is. So you overdraw your account by
1 buck $35, by 5 bucks $35. Now, the average overdraft
amount is $26. So you can see on each one of
those transactions, those banks are making a hefty return.
In fact, it's like a loan with an APR of 16,000%.
And it happens time after time. In other words, you leave the
grocery store, you go pick up your kids at school, you go to a
local convenience shop, you get a cup of coffee, you pay with
your debit card, and boom, you get hit with another $35
overdraft fee, and on and on and on.
In fact, every year some of the biggest banks, Wells Fargo and
Chase, make over $1 billion from consumer overdraft fees.
And some of these banks have built an entire system to try to
maximize the amount they get from their consumers through
these overdraft fees. And if you look collectively the
banking system, this is a $5 billion a year RIP off.
So if you look at the people that are being primarily hit by
this Mr. President, not surprisingly, it's people who
are living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, many of the people that
candidate Trump said he wanted to look out for when he was
campaigning in the last election, If you look closely,
you find that 79% of overdraft fees are charged on about 9% of
accounts. These are accounts where people
have an average balance of around 300 and $50.00.
And so these big banks are praying on the people who
literally are going paycheck to paycheck.
And for those households, the average hit every year is about
$225.00 in exorbitant fees. So you make a tiny
miscalculation and you get hit hard by these predatory
practices. So last year, just last year,
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the one that
Elon Musk and Dozier trying to shut down as we speak, last
year, they developed a rule to help protect, protect consumers.
It was something many of us had pushed for for years, and we
were glad to see them do it. The rule was pretty
straightforward. It's would cap the overdraft
fees at $5 a time instead of $35 a time.
And it would also require banks to be transparent in their
pricing and their overdraft penalty structure so that
consumers would know and have eyes wide open as to what
penalties they were going to incur.
So you wouldn't have people inadvertently hit with 35 bucks
for a cup of coffee, 35 bucks when you go pick up some more
groceries. This is a, this has been come a
way for some of the biggest banks to RIP off consumers,
especially those who are going paycheck to paycheck, as I said,
to the tune of $5 billion. So that's the rule.
That's what the CFPB did, Pretty simple measure, make sure that
consumers don't get ripped off and not even know they're being
ripped off sometimes until they know about the overdraft fee.
And what Republicans have brought to the floor today is a
proposal to override that consumer protection bill to
allow those banks to continue to collect $5 billion from American
consumers, so many of them who are living paycheck to paycheck.
So everybody should know that that's what's going on here.
We got the richest man in the world trying to shut down an
agency that was created to help protect consumers.
And here in the Senate, we have Senate Republicans trying to
overturn a consumer protection rule that saves working people a
little bit of money and make sure that they don't get slammed
for making a small overdraft on their accounts.
So I urge my colleagues to vote to uphold the consumer
protection law that was adopted. So I vote them vote.
If you want to vote yes to protect the rule, you vote no on
this effort to overturn it. And I urge my colleagues to vote
no, Mr. President. Hey, thank you so much for
listening today. I really do appreciate your
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