Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.

My response [to fear of being poor]was to study contracts, finance, economics, to plan, to have a goal, to work on that goal. To learn everything I could. I always poked at the things that scared me most.

I get the reason that you should be willing to negotiate sometimes. But you also ought to be willing to throw a punch.

I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

My mother saved our home with a minimum wage job. But in the 1960s, a minimum wage job would support a family of three above the poverty line. Not today. Not even close. I understood right then that people can work hard, they can play by the rules, and they can still take a hard smack.

Accountability for the largest financial institutions on Wall Street is the bedrock for a strong economy. Hard-working families and honest businesses cannot survive in a world where the rules don’t keep the marketplace honest.

We have to rethink how to teach financial education in the 21st century.