The White House is intensifying its push for new credit-card regulation.

"Enough is enough," said President Obama to a group of voters at a town hall meeting in New Mexico Thursday. Obama says he wants to reform how credit-card issuers deal with consumers in a way that is "built on transparency and accountability and mutual responsibility." He also wants the reform to happen fast, asking Congress to pass legislation by Memorial Day (the Senate is currently debating two bills aimed at protecting consumers.)

Jared Bernstein, chief economic advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden and executive director of the Middle Class Task Force, says that sense of urgency has been brought on by the large number of cardholders that the administration has heard from.

SmartMoney.com sat down with Bernstein to talk about the legislation's impact on consumers. Below are excerpts from our interview.

SmartMoney: Let's talk about some of the practices in place that this bill will affect. Interest rates. People are talking about doubling and tripling of their interest rates. Where does this stop? What's going on with interest rates?

Bernstein: You're absolutely right. These kinds of unfair rate increases are one of the main targets of this legislation. That's really at the heart of consumer protection... It so happens that about 44% of people who are carrying balances on their credit cards are paying rates of above 20%. Those are usury rates. That kind of thing has to stop.

SmartMoney: Consumers are also complaining that they don't get notice with some of these practices -- when their credit limits are cut, when their due dates change. What will this bill do for them?

Bernstein: [It will] correct precisely those kinds of unfair, really unjust, and really uneconomical practices. It's very important in any economical contract that both sides know what they're getting into. Of course, with credit cards, one side knows what they're getting into really well, and the other side tends not to. We need to make sure that the language of the agreement is such that those arbitrary rate hikes, basically the kinds of I would call it tricks, really that some of the companies play on cardholders are no longer allowed.

SmartMoney: There won't be any circumstances where it's acceptable to cut a consumer's credit limit to below the balance?

Bernstein: That's precisely the kind of unfair practice that simply won't be allowed.

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SmartMoney: What will the credit card of the future look like, in terms of rates, fees and rewards?

Bernstein: You may find that the market starts to deliver a pretty simple, plain-vanilla credit card that doesn't have a ton of bells and whistles, because we're trying to create a kind of market competition between card [issuers] that heretofore has not existed.

SmartMoney: Will you apply for that kind of card when it comes out.

Bernstein: Yeah, I think I might.

SmartMoney: Do you think we will see Americans be a little smarter about managing their debt in this new credit card environment?

Bernstein: People get into trouble with credit cards for two reasons. Most commonly, I would say it's because they don't understand the very arbitrary, often unfair, set of rules they've gotten themselves into by signing that contract, a very opaque contract. But the other reason is that people do get in over their heads. That's happened more frequently I would say in recent years, in part because of the recession. We don't by any means suggest that that's not part of the problem. One of the things the president consistently talks about is living within your means.

SmartMoney: It seems like everybody these days has a credit card story. Have you had any firsthand experience with any of these credit card issues that we've been talking about?

Bernstein: Yes, in the sense that as someone who's interested in this consumer protection, I have read my credit card contract. I can tell you and I have a Ph.D. it was unintelligible to me. I couldn't figure it out.