Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Aug 27, 2008, 12:14PM

Joe Biden Wants To Offer You A $2,000 Credit Limit

It's dangerous to read too much into a VP pick, but for young voters Joe Biden's got one red flag worth thinking about. His main special interest vice is the credit card industry, on whose behalf he's pushed legislation through Congress. Consdiering how many kids these days get drowned in a sea of Visa bills, Biden's ties don't exactly reinforce Obama's pro-youth message.

I'm not breaking any new ground when I say that college is expensive. It's hard to pay for. That leads the vast majority of college students to rely, at least in part, on credit cards. Indeed, about a quarter of all college students use credit cards to help pay tuition.

To bring this back to Biden: anyone who has spent basically their entire adult life in the US Senate is going to have certain ties to special interest groups. That's perhaps an unfortunate truth, but it's the truth nonetheless.

And in Biden's case, his weakness is credit card companies. Delaware is a popular home base for the credit industry, so it should come as no surprise that someone who's been representing that state for thirty years has an unseemly relationship with the business. But, when you consider the mounting credit card debt that so many younger voters will be facing in the years to come, it's a troubling situation.

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