A Modest Suggestion for a Democratic Congress

Of course, it will never happen in a Republican Congress, or while Joe MBNA Biden draws breath, but I'd love to see a requirement that price tags show not only the purported price of whatever you're buying (be it a DVD, a new sweater, groceries, or a movie ticket), but also the actual price if you buy it with a credit card and then pay only the minimum amount on your card. In other words, two prices: cash and credit. Yeah, different credit cards have different interest rates, but I think a simple average would probably work well enough for my purposes.

My point, of course, is that most people don't understand that they'll pay many multiples of the purported price if they buy something with a credit card. Using credit to buy something that's "on sale" can be a terrible bargain. Yes, there are calculators on the web that will allow you to figure out the actual price of an item bought on credit. But you don't have access to them when you're standing in the store considering a new pair of running shoes or the latest offering from, say, Apple.

Just as, over extreme industry resistance, we've gotten food companies to label their products so consumers can know what's in the food they eat and drug companies to label their products so consumers can know what the side effects are of the drug they're considering buying, we need to make credit card companies label their product (debt) so consumers understand how much debt they're agreeing to buy along with their movie ticket or book or Home Depot purchase.

If the Democrats thought that they had to go along with the recent draconian revisions to the bankruptcy laws (they didn't, but that's another story), they could at least have insisted upon measures such as the one that I'm proposing in order to help consumers. It's not that I'm anti-credit card. I use one for convenience and to acquire airline miles, but I pay it off in full at the end of the month. I'm not even anti-debt. I have a mortgage and I took out some student loans (long since paid off) to go to law school. In both cases, even with the interest payments, those were good investments that I wouldn't have been able to make without borrowing. I simply think that more Americans would live within their means, and be better off for it in the long run, if they understood the true price of buying on credit.