Bureaucrats want to take away your debit card!. That’s right. Have you seen that advertisement? Banks are going to take away your debit card because they won’t be able to charge retailers 44 cents a transaction anymore. Since they can’t indirectly rip you off anymore, they’re going to stop offering you a debit card. At least, that’s what they’re threatening to do on subway cars and internet sites. And they’re sending lobbyists into every nook and cranny of Washington DC to try to gut the reforms passed last year. These people really should be rousted out of their homes by pitchfork-wielding mobs.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
12 Comments
Recent Posts
- Trump’s Pollster Wants Congress to Save and Increase Obamacare Subsidies
- Will a Boycott Movement Emerge Against the World Cup and Olympics?
- Trump Just Created the Next Decades-Long Conspiracy Theory
- There’s No Strategy from On High That Can Fix the Democratic Party
- A Simple Guide to Why George Joannides Matters
Recent Comments
Oh no! Now I’ll have to choose the debit option instead of the credit option when I go to checkout? The horror of remembering my pin rather than a scribbling a signature.
Destroy the economy? Sure, no problem. Mess with my plastic? Don’t tread on me!!
And on a health care related note, and at the risk of sounding like a privileged ass, I have set of stories about how I’d like it if “bureaucrats got in between me and my doctor.”
So my wisdom teeth are impacted, and in order to be sent overseas I need them removed. I can’t find an oral surgeon in SW Virginia who takes my insurance. I called 4 of them, and I finally found one that does take it (3 of the 4 did not). However, it was going to cost $2,500 and the insurance covers $1,500, so I had to say no.
Now I’m back in Eric Cantor’s district for the week, and I called around. I called 3 surgeons, they either did take my insurance and/or they don’t have openings until May. I finally found one that takes my insurance and can take me on Friday at the cost of $2,029 (so I’ll have to pay $529 out of pocket).
So I’ll be able to get my wisdom teeth removed, finally, after searching endlessly…and this is WITH insurance offered from the Department of Defense (no, not TriCare). End of rant, but it was mostly about that stupid Republican quip, “With single payer you can’t choose your doctor and you’ll wait months for surgery and treatment!!! BE AFRAID!!!!” Screw you, I already can’t choose my doctor and/or am placed on a long waiting list…AND I have to pay out of pocket with one of the best plans in America. I’m lucky to even have coverage, and especially coverage this good…but christ on a stick…
…they either did NOT take my insurance.
And the one I finally found is an hour and a half away.
See the thing is that the Republican attack on “socialized medicine” that you would be restricted from seeing your own doctor might (might) have made sense in 1975. The way the insurance industry refuses to deal with doctors these days, it’s not a relevant attack. It’s still conventional wisdom though – my parents will bitch about their insurance company kicking their doctor off the rolls and yet be able to turn around and complain about “socialized medicine” without any sense of irony or hypocrisy.
It’s like complaining about the Post Office. I still see people attacking the Post Office for being some horrible bureaucratic Hell and I wonder “When was the last time you went to the Post Office? 1986?” My local Post Office is run far more efficiently than the local FedEx/Kinkos manages to be. The lines take almost no time at all (except around April 15th when I avoid it like the plague). And it has friendlier and better trained people working there too. And yet the Post Office remains some kind of terrible example of government inefficiency. So stupid.
Actually, post office lines here are wildly variable; it’s usually 30 minutes at the PO where I’ve had a box for 20 years, but at others around town, it’s often very quick. (And the counter help is, in fact, far better than at the average FedEx or UPS store.) The bigger problems I have with USPS are policy ones, due to its emphasis on profit, which has led it to actively discourage mass mailings unless they can be automated (i.e., the mailer is a mailing house or large company). Every envelope now has to be bar-coded to qualify for bulk rates. Your average peace group or community association can’t do that.
For the smaller nonprofits I’ve generally worked with, the post office is a lot less useful than it was 20 years ago, and “running it more like a business” is exactly why. They have a state-run monopoly on a particular type of communication, but make it prohibitively expensive for smaller users to use it to reach constituents. For them, the nonprofit and bulk rates have effectively been abolished.
Yup. Saw that advertisement. About 200 times, right here on Booman Trib. But thanks for satisfying a mild curiosity about what it’s all about. Classic astroturfing — could be a casebook study.
so, now I gotta go back to writing checks?
I received a call yesterday morning (Tuesday) from someone working on the behalf of the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC). The pitch was that massive new fees were going to be charged as a result of the legislation and that I should call my Congressman and urge repeal. I stopped the caller mid-spiel and asked who EPC was, or rather, who was supporting them. The telemarketer’s mistake had been to mention Durbin’s sponsorship of something during the course of the call (which may have been the reasonable cost card services provision of Dodd-Frank).
It only took few seconds to find to find out what EPC’s story was.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Electronic_Payments_Coalition
Unfortunately, I receive an enormous amount of these types of calls.
Yes, and thanks to Google ads I’ve seen that one and the ad supporting private college rip-offs appear on every liberal site I visit, including this one.
Makes as much sense as SEIU advertising on Red State.
Out here in poor rural America, many local merchants do not accept debit cards. They process the transaction as a credit card and have been avoiding these fees, simple as that. A few don’t accept plastic of any type saying they can’t afford the swipe pad, the dial-up expense for verifying, etc. Also, many Elder Poors living here are frightened by plastic cards and continue to write checks, often for amounts less than $20, with a great deal of fumbling in their purses for their checkbook and difficulty finding a working pen, while the check-out line grows behind them. Since being washed up on this shore, I’ve accepted the “slower pace.”
I’ve often told you all that moving to Eastern Nowhere, NC, was like being transported back in time. Writing checks and paying cash is just another aspect of that time warp.
I find it difficult to believe that the invention of the debit card didn’t save banks a ton of expenditures. Just think of all the bank teller jobs that were eliminated. And instant transfers of money have got to be cheaper than rifling thru stacks of checks, stamping them paid and sorting them into envelops to be returned to the account holder. It’s really scandalous that they were ever allowed to charge retailers a fee for saving themselves money.
A good friend is now going to lose her house. She believed the crap about re-adjusting mortgages, and applied. After dicking her around for a year, losing her paperwork over and over, they denied her readjustment. She could retain the house by paying much more for a period, but she can’t afford that.
I do not understand why some of these homeowners who have been totally totally screwed by the banks, so that the banks can steal from them, have not gotten really angry and taken out some bankers. The only thing that will make the bankers pay attention is a severe spanking by the people they are fucking over.