No financial protection for you.
Jamelle Bouie
finds a very special nugget in Paul Ryan's
latest iteration of what he calls a budget [pdf]. In the section that details all of the ways in which they'll gut the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, they take aim at their favorite target, all of us:
This resolution also supports cancelling the ability of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (created by Dodd--Frank) to fund its operations by spending from the Federal Reserve’s yearly remittances to the Treasury Department. Dodd--Frank was written to provide off-budget financing for the new bureau, which is housed within the Federal Reserve but enjoys complete autonomy. To preserve its independence as the nation’s monetary authority, the Federal Reserve is off-budget, and its excess earnings from monetary operations are returned to the Treasury to reduce the deficit. Now, instead of directing these remittances to reduce the deficit, Dodd-Frank requires diverting a portion of them to pay for a new bureaucracy with the authority to write far-reaching rules on financial products and restrict credit to the very customers it seeks to ‘‘protect,’’ outside the annual oversight of Congress through the appropriations process. [p. 41]
In other words, they'd defund the CFPB. The Bureau is funded out of the Federal Reserve, and not subject to congressional appropriations. That was on purpose, to keep hostile Republicans from doing what they obviously are itching to do—kill it. So they have to have this roundabout approach of rescinding the funding mechanism for the bill. Tricky stuff.
So Paul Ryan and his minions stayed up late, racking their brains, to come up with one more way to accomplish their primary mission: screwing the average Joe.