The right-wing media repeatedly describes Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her political mentor, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, as promoting financial ideas that are painfully out of touch with mainstream voters in the United States. But a new Business Insider poll finds that when it comes to comes to credit card interest rates, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are not only mainstream — they are in agreement with the majority of Republican voters.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have proposed legislation that would cap interest rates for credit cards at 15 percent; their bill is being called the Loan Shark Prevention Act. And according to an Insider poll, nearly 70 percent of Republican primary voters and 73 percent of Democratic primary voters agree with their idea.
Insider, speaking to U.S. voters, noted that the current median credit card interest rate is around 21 percent. According to CreditCards.com, that is a 9 percent increase from a decade ago, when the median credit card interest rate was around 12 percent.
But despite receiving so much support from both Republican and Democratic voters, the Loan Shark Prevention Act — which would also cap interest rates at 15 percent on all federal loans in the U.S. and institute postal banking — has little chance of actually becoming law. Even if it were to be passed by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, it would face a steep uphill climb in the GOP-controlled Senate. And if the AOC/Sanders bill did, by some chance, pass in both houses of Congress, it would probably be vetoed by President Donald Trump when it reached his desk for signature.
The Loan Shark Prevention Act, at this point, is merely symbolic. But as Insider’s poll demonstrates, the idea behind it enjoys widespread voter support — even among Republicans.
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