Credit cards reap rewards of entrapment

People who pay their credit card bills every month feel aggrieved, because if the restructuring of the credit card industry goes through, they will mostly likely be required to pay annual fees. They say it’s unfair to punish the “good” people who pay every month. Now the responsible people will be punished while the irresponsible people will pay less.

I will admit to being one of the responsible people. I have two credit cards that I dutifully pay off every month without fail.

Now I am going to be charged fees I have not had before. That is true. But what is also true is that the “bad” people who are less able to pay than I am have been subsidizing me. I have benefited from their inability or unwillingness to pay up every month.

The credit card company has made enough money off them to give me a free ride. That doesn’t seem fair to me. It smacks “income redistribution” from richer people like me onto poorer or less financially savvy people.

What is remarkable is that people like me think they deserve to have other people pay the costs of their use of credit cards. As far as I can tell, the only reason the business was ever structured this way is that credit card companies were competing for my business, and having lured me in, hoped I would fall behind so they could charge me penalties and high interest rates. I outwitted them. I paid. And all those poor slobs who fell behind were overcharged so I could have this banking service for which I paid not one red cent.

The other argument against this restructuring of the credit card industry is that just when people need credit the most, it will be harder to get. Wrong. People don’t need credit; they need money. We have confused these two things for a couple of decades and thought that credit was money. Credit card companies have been willing to give me a line of credit that I did not deserve and could never pay back in this lifetime. They were not helping me. They were doing just the opposite. They were giving me the opportunity to commit financial suicide. This opportunity granted so many people the illusion that they were better off than they were. What these people needed was not more credit but cheaper ways to house and feed themselves and more money in their paychecks.

Easy credit was simply a way of exploiting their relative poverty and their appetite for things they could not afford.

Credit cards gave the financial industry a way to exploit the poor previously limited to shady lenders and illegal enterprises. People heading up the credit card industry could go to church and the country club without the stigma attached to those running porn shops. It was banking, for crying out loud. Banking. It had started out as a service for business people with expense accounts who had a Diner’s Club card in their pocket, but over time it degenerated into exploitation.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of those people who have been paying for me to have the free use of credit cards for years. You have paid more than you cost the card companies and I appreciate it. I am going to have to pay my own way now, and while I don’t relish the idea, I realize I owe you.

To credit card companies with all their tricky little traps and ever-changing interest rates, I wish for you a future of making an honest living.

It is really not so bad; many people have been doing it for years. It may not be as lucrative, but being transparent, honest and straightforward has its rewards.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain.