Leadership Quote by Sue Kelly

“Unfairly” is doing the heavy lifting here. Sue Kelly frames a technical banking issue as a moral injury, turning foregone interest into something closer to stolen wages. The line doesn’t ask whether small businesses should earn interest on checking accounts; it presumes they already deserve it, and that the only reason they aren’t is an unjust system waiting to be corrected by legislation with a pre-sold name: the Business Checking Freedom Act. “Freedom” is classic political packaging, laundering policy detail into a value proposition no one wants to oppose.

The phrasing is also engineered for urgency. “Across the country” nationalizes what might otherwise sound like niche regulatory tinkering. “On a daily basis” converts an abstract rate-of-return problem into a running meter of loss, a rhetorical trick that mimics late fees and overdraft charges - feelings small business owners know viscerally. “Until ... becomes law” establishes a clean villain and a clean fix: time itself is the antagonist, and Congress is the hero if it moves fast enough.

Subtext: the real fight is with banking rules and incumbents that benefit from non-interest-bearing business checking, effectively using small firms’ balances as cheap funding. Kelly’s sentence invites the audience to see reform not as a handout but as a correction of an asymmetry: banks monetize float; Main Street gets nothing. It’s a politician’s most reliable move - translating regulatory plumbing into a populist grievance - and it works because it makes lost opportunity feel like active harm.