Blog de Dunlap: The CFPB, student debt cancelation, and what’s to come

I never in a zillion years thought I'd be a U.S. senator. But my life has had a lot of twists and turns, just like a lot of people's.

I grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class. After my daddy's heart attack, my family came within an inch from losing our house, but my mother got a minimum wage job at Sears that saved our family.

I dropped out of college at 19 to get married, but got a second chance at a public college that cost $50 a semester and got to live my dream of becoming a public school teacher.

I've dedicated my career to studying why families go broke and fighting to rebuild the middle class. After Wall Street crashed our economy in 2008, I fought to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect people from getting scammed by big banks and corporations. The CFPB has already returned more than $16 billion to American consumers who've been cheated.

After Senate Republicans vowed to block my nomination to serve as the CFPB's first director, I went back home to Massachusetts and ran against one of them — and I beat him.

Since then, we've gotten a lot done. Like putting a new tax on massive corporate profits to help fund the fight against climate change. Lowering the cost of hearing aids. Getting student loan cancelation to the president's desk — and even though an extremist Supreme Court has stood in his way, President Biden has still been able to cancel around $127 billion in student debt so far for nearly 3.6 million borrowers.

I'm running for re-election this year because there are still things we need to do to make our government work for working people — not billionaires and big corporations. Like a wealth tax. Universal child care. A solution to the housing affordability crisis. And I'm fighting like hell for these policies. But I can't do this without your support. Will you make a contribution of $100 or whatever you can today so I can keep fighting for working families in Congress?

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Throughout my career, I've learned that when you start talking about policies that help working people — like canceling student debt or passing universal child care for example — plenty of people share the same feedback over and over and over:

"Great idea, but that will never happen."

Meanwhile when big banks need a big bailout after gambling with people's livelihoods to boost their profits, or when corporate lobbyists beg for a tax break — those same people respond with:

"We'll get that done ASAP."

It's maddening, and I'm fighting to fix this imbalance in our government. We're already making huge progress with the CFPB and student debt cancelation — despite everyone saying that these things would "never happen." But we need to keep fighting.

We can keep proving the naysayers wrong and making real change for working people. We can keep showing what it looks like to make our government work for everyone, not just the wealthy and well-connected. It doesn't all happen overnight, but it gets done because we fought side by side as a grassroots movement.

When we ignore the critics, aren't afraid to take on the righteous fights, and invest in the change we truly believe in, we win. There's much more progress to make together, and that's why I'm running for reelection, and why I'm asking for your support. SoDanielle, will you pitch in $100 or anything you can to help grow our campaign and help make big, structural change?

Thanks for being a part of this,

Elizabeth