Word: cards
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...someone money. You go to pay him back. He takes your money - and then charges you $15 for having paid him. That might seem unfair. Yet a few years ago, the Government Accountability Office found it to be standard practice for certain credit-card companies when customers made payments over the telephone. The investigatory arm of Congress couldn't say exactly how many card companies imposed such phone-payment fees - nowhere were the firms required to disclose their policies...
...Starve the beast” has been the mantra of anti-tax Republicans for decades. But, so far, depriving the “beast”—big government—of revenue hasn’t led to starvation. The beast has had a credit card, a card with a seemingly perennial teaser rate and a credit limit it can more or less set itself. Republican politicians, who would have lost their power to vote tax cuts to their wealthy donors if they hadn’t been re-elected, have not wanted to be implicated...
...Republicans are truly out of power and, if you believe them, the Democrats are using the federal credit card to throw one crazy party. Yet, while it now indeed appears that the fiscal year 2010 federal deficit could surpass 13 percent of GDP, the borrowing is hardly paying for a party. Ironically, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government for the first time in 14 years, the beast, while in no imminent danger of death by starvation, is gravely malnourished. This is the case because the beast has two components: the federal government, but also the many...
...Economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, think we should go even further. In their book Nudge, they sketch a system in which once a year credit-card companies would be required to break out all the fees, interest and other charges customers paid over the past 12 months. That information would come on a person's statement as well as electronically for easier comparison shopping. "By knowing their precise usage and fee payments, customers would get a better sense of what they are paying for," write...
...difference is that we'd be telling people not just about a particular credit card's characteristics but about what those characteristics mean in terms of human behavior. It would be similar to Federal Trade Commission rules that require auto manufacturers to say how many miles per gallon cars get whether a person is driving in the city or in the country. Depending on a person's behavior, the cost changes - and that is made clear right on the sticker. (See pictures of stores that are no more...