Sunday, June 20, 2010

South Carolina House turns down pay day loan bill veto

Last week, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, exercised his veto power on H.3790, a pay day loan bill that would have made the standard repayment period 120 days instead of the common 14 without increasing the total fees charged by lenders. Furthermore, H.3790 would have eliminated unsecured loans in South Carolina and outlawed the common practice of a customer presenting a lender with a post-dated check. Yet as S.C. Politics Today reports, the state House has overturned Mark Sanford’s payday loan-friendly veto. H.3790 would have also addressed inequity in South Carolina’s mortgage industry regarding licensing fees.

Resource for this article: South Carolina House overturns veto of pay day bill

Mark Sanford was against payday loan-strangling H.3790

In a letter to the state House, Governor Mark Sanford writes concerning his veto of the pay day loan bill that

“Although this type of regulation is intended to protect the public, these kinds of laws ultimately decrease the number and type of available financing options and make it harder for new lenders to enter the market. In other words, consumers have fewer choices and the available options become more expensive. … Some people will benefit from payday–style loans and some will not, and we continue to believe that individual consumers are better equipped than a government bureaucracy to know whether a short-term loan is a wise decision in any given circumstance.”

The public knows what works best for them

A pay day or comparable loans with no credit check – whether they’re unsecured loans or not – are generally a lot more the domain of credit-strapped consumers, rather than state legislators who are paid significantly a lot more, so it follows that the general public should be allowed to determine if the loans work for them. Gov. Mark Sanford can see that, so it’s strange that the South Carolina legislature cannot. Currently, the short term personal loan regulation in South Carolina limits borrowers to $550 at a time, and they can only have a single active loan. This activity is tracked in an electronic database.

Yet an additional South Carolina veto overturned

Another overturned veto ventures into territory of Mark Sanford’s alleged history of impropriety with South Carolina taxpayer funds. The House nixed Gov. Sanford’s veto of a bill that would “allow details to be made public in a state ethics investigation of the governor when it indicates possible cause that a violation may have occurred,” reports S.C. Politics Today. The vote against Sanford’s veto of the governor investigation bill was a landslide, 102-2 in favor of overturning his veto. Sanford has gone on record as saying that he vetoed the bill because he wanted the language of that bill expanded to consist of all state lawmakers, not just the governor.

A lot more information on this topic

thestatecom.typepad.com/ygatoday/2010/06/house-overrides-sanford-on-payday-lending-ethics.html

docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.scgovernor.com/NR/rdonlyres/A0AB7D58-484C-49EC-9DD7-856ED2D5D7C3/35671/H3790MortgageLoanOriginator.pdf



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