Sixteen hundred bureaucrats with the power to charge billions in fines, with a $600 million budget outside of the congressional appropriations process, and all because Elizabeth Warren compared mortgages to toasters.
"Of all the ideas that get published in … journals like that, not so many make it into law," Warren boasted in 2011, at the launch of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
She was referring to her essay "Unsafe At Any Rate," published by the "lefty" Democracy Journal in 2007, which was used as the impetus for the Obama administration to establish the CFPB. Warren's reasoning: If people are too stupid that they would buy a toaster that could blow up their house, then they certainly aren't smart enough to read the fine print on a mortgage.
Using a toaster as an analogy wasn't just a cute way for the then-Harvard law professor to begin her 5,000-word "manifesto" proposing her "new regulatory regime." No, the toaster was the thesis.
"It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house," Warren began. "But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street—and the mortgage won't even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner."
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