My advice is to treat [credit cards] like what they are: little plastic grenades that must be handled very carefully.

Once kids get older, the list is longer. So here goes: Stay out of debt. Sometimes debt is necessary, to buy a home or to get an education, but not to buy a sweater or to eat out.

The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America's middle class. Sure, the rich are doing great. Giant corporations are doing great. Lobbyists are doing great. But we need an economy where everyone else who works hard gets a shot at doing great!

I want to be blunt: We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work, and access to birth control, in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago - until the Republicans brought them back.

That is especially important as more young people must take on huge debt loads to go to college.

Right now, with millions of Americans still out of work, and struggling to recover from the worst economic downturn since the great depression, with 40 million Americans dealing with student loans, with millions of people working full-time at minimum wage and still living in poverty, with the big banks getting bigger and the workers getting poorer, and seniors struggling to make ends meet, Republicans in Washington have decided the most important thing for them to focus on is how to deny women access to birth control.

You have two pages, that's the whole credit card agreement. The terms are clear and flat and easy to see so anyone can read them. So you could lay four credit cards in front of you and say, 'Oh, that's the one that has the highest rate, that's the one that has the really scary provision that could hurt me.'