For the life of me, I don't understand why the Democrats won't make a big, big electoral issue out of credit card reform.  Here is an issue that touches nearly all Americans, and one where a liberal policy would have broad, populist appeal.  Yet many elected Democrats seem more interested in falling all over themselves to play nice with Citibank.

 1) Prevent lenders from changing the contractual terms of the loan after the money has already been borrowed.

This is just a plain and simple issue of fairness.  Lenders should be able to charge a penalty rate on new purchases, but it is simply ridiculous for them to impose draconian interest rates on purchases made under different terms.  These practices cause debts to explode, and seem designed to drive struggling households to the brink of bankruptcy and bleed them dry.

2) Require lenders to provide accurate information about how long it will take to pay off the debt by making the minimum payment.

Providing people with the tools they need to prioritize their spending should help reduce the number of bankruptcies and benefit all parties. 

3) Provide free access for all Americans to the information collected by credit bureaus.

This should be a no-brainer.  Free access to your own information as often as you need it.  This is the simplest way to combat identity theft and reduce abuse of the information collected on private individuals.

One word: MBNA.

Usury laws have largely been circumvented by the law/rulings that allow credit card companies to incorporate in, say, North Dakota, and use North Dakotan interest rate laws to govern consumers in, say, New Jersey. North Dakota gets some small amount of income in the form of business taxes, few North Dakotans get horribly screwed by the credit card companies (and fewer connect that to the actions of their politicians), and the credit card company gets rich by screwing over the New Jersey consumers.

Some states (New York, I think, is one) have laws that give their consumers some measure of protection from out-of-state lenders, but it's not often enough.

Thanks for the info on usary.  Are we saying that heretofore the matter has been a state issue, and that credit has evolved into an interstate commerce.  Therefore it is time for federal regualtion?

 If so, the next order would be to find congressmen willing to carry the water.  My senator, Feinstein, would not likely be one of them. Her votes have been straight out of the CitiBank playbook.

  One of the primary reasons our market-driven system has been so successful (in comparison with Japan's, for example) is the lenient way in which we deal with insolvency and bancrupty.  As much as we don't like to think about people not paying back their loans, without the <em>ability</em> to take risk as allowed by lenient bancruptcy laws, we wouldn't have second and third tries.

  At the same time, the Bush adminstration would like to hold creditors responsible for money lent them rather than hold then lenders responsponsible for their own lending practices!  If the Bush Administration trule adhered to a remotely free-market philosophy (which I don't expect anyone to argue they do), the credit card companies would be 'on their own'  - left to deal with the bad analyses they made in the first place.

   I affirm what Cathy said above: that danger lurks in the fine prints. I disagrree that we need legislation to help us.  Instead, consumers need to be freed of the legislation protecting the large credit companies from their own bad loans.

The typical governmental solution will be to guarantee the consumer's debt to the credit companies, and thus continue the cycle of bad lending. Only by removing government from the equation can we get the credit companies to take care of themselves and stop lending to obvious troubled cases.