Saturday, October 03, 2009

The Law, You Say?

We received a pleasant little note from our credit card company saying that they were going to start instituting higher interest rates -- but, heck, if you pay more than you need to, they'll apply the payment to the part of the bill where the interest rate is the highest. It's worded as if they're granting us a boon. Look how nice we're being! Reading it, we started laughing. Do you people really think we don't know that you're being required to do this by the laws fought by the Republicans, and passed by the Democratic Congress?

Will there be efforts to paint this requirement as a bad thing? Heck, they've already started. Will there be fees that we don't pay now, and will have to, just to have the card? Yes. Is this requirement a damn good idea, anyway?

No doubt in my mind, whatsoever.

1 comment:

Cerulean Bill said...

Privately, I'm willing to admit that these changes may mean that people who rely on credit just to make it will be harmed. I don't like that, and I hope alternatives can be found. But overall, it's a good thing. The banking/credit industrial complex has shown that when there's money to be made, relying on the good intentions of the people administering the function -- even if they're basically decent people, as I suspect most of them are; I'm not talking about, say, Angelo Mozillo (and how much does it say about our society that his name trips easily off my tongue?) -- but even if they're decent, abuses occur as people think We could tweak it and make just a little more, thats a good thing for us and not a bad/terribly bad/legally hazardous thing for us/well it is but look at the money we'll make! No amount of laws can eliminate that tendency.

But they can, by god, limit it.