Professor Smartass

Our elected representatives in Washington seem congenitally unable to punish and neuter Wall Street for the economic terrorism they have visited upon the United States and the entire world with their various scams and trade deals that are decimating the middle class, so we are left to do it for ourselves.

One way to screw them is to stop doing business with national banks and move to community banks or better yet a CREDIT UNION.

NPR revealed another way to castrate these bastards when they talked about the difference between the fees for credit versus debit and who profits from each.

The bottom line is credit charges to merchants are much higher, usually a flat fee plus a percentage, whereas debits are just a flat fee. And credit card companies twists the knife in the businesses by having higher set fees for cheaper purchases. How much does it cost businesses? One merchant interviewed said:

"On the cost of a $5 purchase item, we lose a dollar of that sale."

While this directly hurts businesses, it's not hard to figure out that this extra cost will be past will be passed on to customers.

Two companies control 80% of all credit card business, which is why they can charge such extortionate rates. And those fees go to them. While debit charges travel through the same networks, they don't pay nearly as much to those monopolies.

There are two ways you can use this knowledge to screw the Wall Street assholes who are screwing us:

• Obviously, hit the DEBIT button instead of credit every time you have a choice. If enough people did this, it would help businesses as much as any tax cut (without cutting tax revenues we could use for schools, health care, and taking care of our veterans maimed in our now endless wars).

• A little less obvious is telling business people to let customers know that hitting debit saves them money and that savings could be passed on to customers. One woman called into the NPR show and said when clerks ask her "debit or credit," she asks them what they prefer and they say they don't care.

Couldn't small business people figure out a nice way to tell their customers that they accept credit but prefer debit?

I imagine the credit card companies have a clause in the fine print that says merchants can't give a discount for choosing debit, but they could figure out some creative ways to reward them.

The best thing about hitting the DEBIT button is it helps the REAL businesses that provide products and services while hurting the Ponzi schemes of sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who have never made or done anything of value in their whole lives.

If the law cannot or will not reach into their gated community and private compounds, we can--not by climbing over their walls but simply by cutting off the flow of our money that keeps them alive and that they use as the club to beat us.

Now if we could just convince their servants to leave them, they would die of starvation and infection from their unwiped asses.

NOTE: The NPR story had more details like how buying gas can lead to overdraft fees even if your bank account isn't overdrawn. Here's a TRANSCRIPT and the AUDIO.

Labels: credit card, credit or debit, credit union, debit, npr, wall street

I always do the debit card, because the interest we pay on credit cards is arbitrary and often outrageous.
I'm thinking of practicing a little self-discipline this year and using cash.

I for one, am no longer using credit cards. I am paying off my credit card debt, and then NO MORE credit cards except for emergencies. I am also looking into changing from Wells Fargo (who I hate) to a credit union or small bank. I think a lot of people are doing this, and in the long run it will greatly hurt the banks bottom line. Next we need to take back the printing of currency from THE FED, and relieve them of their duties.

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