Jan. 15 Democratic debate transcript

Sen. Obama:  Well, not a rebuttal. I just want to pick up on a couple of things that have been said.
Number one, part of the reason that Kuwait and others are able to come in and purchase, or at least bail out, some of our financial institutions is because we don't have an energy policy.

And we are sending close to $1 billion a day. And this administration has consistently failed to put forward a realistic plan that is going to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; is going to invest in solar and wind and biodiesel.

You look at a state like Nevada; one thing I know is folks have got a lot of sun here.
And yet we have not seen any serious effort, on the part of this administration, to spur on the use of alternative fuels, raise fuel efficiency standards on cars. That would make a substantial difference in our balance of payments and that would make a substantial difference in terms of their capacity to purchase our assets.

And the second thing, I just want to point out, is that the subprime lending mess -- part of the reason it happened was because we had an administration that does not believe in any kind of oversight.

And we had the mortgage industry spending $185 million lobbying to prevent provisions such as the ones that I've proposed over a year ago that would say, you know, you've got to disclose properly what kinds of loans you're giving to people on mortgages.

You've got to disclose if you've got a teaser rate and suddenly their mortgage payments are going to jack up and they can't pay for them. And one of the things that I intend to do as president of the United States is restore a sense of accountability and regulatory oversight over the financial markets.

We have the best financial markets in the world, but only if they are transparent and accountable and people trust them. And, increasingly, we have not had those structures in place.

Williams: Time is up, Senator.

Russert: Senator Edwards, poor folks, middle class folks really feeling the pinch.

Former Sen. Edwards:  Yes.

Russert: Bankruptcies are up 40 percent in one year, 5 percent of credit card debts are now delinquent. In 2001, you voted for a bankruptcy bill which was the precursor to the 2005 bankruptcy bill that become law, which made it much tougher for middle class folks, particularly women, when they became bankrupt.

Do you regret that vote?

Former Sen. Edwards:  I absolutely do. I should not have voted for that bankruptcy law.
If you look at what's happening in America today, the bankruptcies that are occurring, about half of them are the result of medical costs. And the idea that any single mom who has a child who gets catastrophically sick and incurs $30,000 of medical cost has to go into bankruptcy as a result, and can't be relieved of that debt, makes absolutely no sense. And it's not fair and it's not right.

And I spoke just a few minutes ago about the great struggles that the middle class are faced with in this country, and you hear it every single day. Because what's happening in America is jobs are leaving, cost of everything is going up -- health care, college tuition, everything -- and, on top of that, middle class incomes are not going up.

The incomes at the very top are going up. Profits of big corporations are going up. But the incomes of middle class families are not going up.

So the question is, what do we do about it? Besides having somebody who truly understands in a personal way what's happening, what would the president of the United States do? There are a bunch of things we need to do.

We desperately need truly universal health care that covers every single American and dramatically reduces health care costs. We do need, as Barack spoke about just a few minutes ago, a radical transformation of the way we produce and use energy. We can create at least a million new jobs in that transition.

We need a national law cracking down on predatory and payday lenders that are taking advantage of our most vulnerable families. We ought to raise -- the national minimum wage is going up to $7.25 an hour. That's fine. It's not enough.

The national minimum wage should be at least nine and a half dollars an hour. It ought to be indexed to go up on its own. We need to make it easier for kids to go to college. My proposal is that we say to any young person in America who's willing to work when they're in college, at least 10 hours a week, we'll pay for their tuition and books at a state university or community college.

And that can be paid for by getting rid of big banks as the intermediary in student loans. They make $4 billion or $5 billion a year. That money ought to be going to sending kids to college.