Legislation known as the Credit Card Competition Act, first introduced in Congress in 2022, is described by its sponsors as encouraging “competition in electronic credit transactions.” But if lawmakers end up passing the measure, opponents say it could also torpedo the rich rewards and perks that cardholders have enjoyed for years.
“Will consumers lose? Probably,” wrote Brian Riley, director of the credit advisory service at Mercator Advisory Group, in an August 2022 post to the Mercator blog. “Their reward programs will dry up, just as they did with debit cards.”
This really has very little to do with consumers and everything to do with a tug of war between processors, banks and businesses. I’m skeptical that any potential savings to businesses is going to be passed on to consumers.
From a personal perspective, I’ll miss rewards cards if they go away. I make all my purchases with plastic and pay off the balances in full every month. In 2022, I received $711 in cash back.
We could also just stop using predatory cards so much. The fact that users get a kickback is part of the design. It doesn’t benefit us in the end.
Credit card companies are basically a 2% leech on the entire economy.
Sounds right. It’s not like there is some lobby of consumers out there writing legislation like this. And the last ones to ever write legislation are legislators.
I can’t think of even ONE instance where a change to policies, legislation, manufacturing, shipping, or anything else that resulted in lower costs has ever been passed on to consumers outside of co-ops like Costco and REI.
The biggest concern for me is eg, that “zero foreign transaction fees” is considered a perk. I can live without cash back probably, but losing the forex perks would be a nightmare, and would cost me easily a thousand dollars per year.
That’s probably the goal.