“Congress should pressure Postmaster General DeJoy and the USPS Board of Governors to reverse course, and instead of another mail slow down, reinstate the 2012 mail delivery service standards. They must not stray even one step away from USPS’s universal service obligation: to deliver the mail to everyone, in every ZIP code. USPS is a public service for all, and a lifeline for many, especially rural America.”
Natalia Renta, senior policy counsel, Americans for Financial Reform: “Taxes are a very big issue. The Trump tax cuts were a significant giveaway to big corporations and billionaires and Wall Street. We’re standing very close to a tax fight in 2025 and we’ll be having a big fight about what type of country we want to live in and whether corps and wall street should pay their fair share or whether public servants and teachers should pay a higher tax rate.”
The lone DeFi sceptic on the witness panel, Mark Allen Hays — a senior policy analyst with consumer advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform — agreed that security issues plague DeFi projects. But “the problem goes deeper,” he said, adding that many hacks are inside jobs set up by the founders themselves. These could be addressed by existing rules under US securities regulation, he said, which demands disclosures from regulated entities.
Dimon’s tactic was to argue that inflation—Powell’s foremost worry during the past three years—would get worse if the rule took effect, because banks would have to raise the cost of borrowing to pay for the increase in capital reserves. Mortgages and small-business loans would be smaller. Pensions and college funds would produce lower returns. The price of a soda would increase. But as the nonprofit Americans for Financial Reform noted in a comment on the rule, “Banks could very easily raise their current capital levels by simply retaining more earnings, which are plentiful right now, instead of buying back shares or paying dividends.”
“This is an example of corporate monopoly power. They exert a certain price — really, any price that they want — and the parents are at the corporations’ mercy to pay that price,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “They have no choices.”
Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform, said communities of color often have the highest medical debt rates for many reasons. “Black and Latine families are more likely to have jobs without access to health insurance, and so that would drive up medical debt,” Zinner explained. “There’s also been disparate health treatments for these communities.”
