Democrat's Love The Little GuyFollow

Or maybe not.

Business complains about interchange fees, banks are t3h debil, fees capped. Retailers win, banks lose, consumers could get f'ucked. Once again, the Democrats giving us a dry ***-f'uck while telling us they know what's best.

Actually, I'm pretty sure they do. The company that makes them doesn't use sweatshops and recycles like a mother f'ucker.

They are leather, though, so PETA is pissed.

Aaaaaand the point eludes you like a greased pig at a southern county fair.

Business exists to make a profit. Government chose which business's profit was more "legitimate". Consumers will be the ones that suffer in the end. Democrats f'ucked the little guy.

Focus, please.

You guys act like getting f'ucked is a bad thing.

I don't like getting f'ucked. I prefer to be doing the f'ucking.

I've done tried damn near everything I care to, thank you very much. My *** is exit only.

I admit, that first reading this, it seemed like a bad idea, particularly if banks were actually going to cap debit card transactions at $50, but I should have known that that was merely a sensationalist headline. Nothing in the article suggests where a cap on debits would be. As long as debit cards are viable methods of payment, this doesn't really impact "the little guy" on a noteworthy scale. If anything, I'm glad they tip the scale towards small businesses, which actually provide products and services, rather than the cash-wrangling banks.

One bank is considering it, but they won't do it, because they'll lose customers to banks that don't do it. Give me a break.

Ben Bernanke is a Democrat now? Sh*t, learn something false every day.

Maybe you're right, Obama should think about sacking him and putting in a Democrat instead. These Republican policies really are running us into the ground. In retrospect it probably was a mistake to try to be bipartisan within Obama's cabinet, the Republicans he elected in moderate good faith are proving to be a nightmare, eh?

Edited, Mar 10th 2011 12:24pm by bsphil

Hey look! It's another example of Conservatives predicting the bad side effects of a proposed Democratic Party idea, and being dead on accurate! Who could have predicted that if you cap certain fees collected by banks, they'll just shift to charging more for other things in order to re-coup their losses? Oh wait! That was us. Sigh...


Jibe aside, there are several kinda questionable aspects of the article though. I'm just not sure how lowering the cap on debit card spending helps protect them from fraud. That just makes no sense at all. Most loss due to fraud occurs on credit cards, not debit cards. I would suspect that the more likely reason to place caps on debit card transactions would be to either:

1. Increase the total number of transactions relative to the total dollar amount handled. This has nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with trying to get those transaction fees back. The assumption would be that instead of the consumer buying a bunch of stuff at once with one swipe of the card, he'll make more purchases for less money at each POS. I'm not sure how well this would work, but whatever.

2. Push consumers away from debit cards (on which the banks make very little money) and into credit cards (where they earn a lot of money). Debit cards are less preferred by banks exactly because they can't charge people interest on a carried debt. The best they can do is occasionally nail someone for overdraft charges and whatnot. This seems more likely of the two btw.


I have no doubt that those big banks are going to come up with ways to get that money, I just don't necessarily agree with the explanations of the reasoning provided in the article.

I actually like BoA. I've never paid any fees, have always received pretty solid service, and they also gave me a decent chunk of change. I may be an outlier here, but I think the utility they provide me is greater than the utility I provide them. Hopefully they think the same.

That's not it at all. We were "right" that the Democrats were wasting our time by attempting to avoid having that sun rise in the East by simply changing the labels on all the maps in the country.

We were right that the Democrats were wasting our time by attempting to reduce the profits the banks were making. We correctly predicted that the banks would simply shift the fees and costs to other parts of their business to get the money back. The primary point we conservatives are trying to get people to figure out is that promises to protect consumers from the evil money grubbing banking industry is an empty one at best and to not take such promises seriously.


It's about the Democrats constantly attempting to gain political advantage by making those sorts of promises. It's about pointing out that they are effectively lying to the people. The banks are going to charge as much money on their services as the market will bear. No amount of government regulation is going to fix that. Most conservatives understand this. Most liberals don't, and the occasional smart ones who do pretend not to in order to talk the rest of them into giving them political power on a false promise.


It's ultimately about yet more failed promises from the Democrats. Don't you see the trend here?

Edited, Mar 10th 2011 5:09pm by gbaji