Dems Are Shocked...SHOCKED! That Banks Would Pass New Regulatory Costs On To Consumers

If you have a Bank of America debit card after January 1st you can expect to pay a $5 monthly fee if you use it, whether for debit or credit.  Red State tells us why:

Congratulations, Congressional Democrats: you’ve managed to soak the working poor again.

Bank of America will start charging debit-card users $5 a month to pay for purchases. The move comes as the cards increasingly replace cash and as banks look for ways to offset the loss of revenue from a new rule that will limit how much they can collect from merchants.

Via Instapundit. You see, what happened here is that Senator Dick Durbin took a break from throwing minority kids out of private schools to extend his legislative magic to the field of merchant debit card fees. The plan? Force the banks to give up their greedy, greedy profits by limiting merchant-to-bank transaction fees, thus saving the merchants money, which they would then pass along to the customer in the form of lower prices. Which sounded… actually, it sounded stupid in theory, even then. It sounds really stupid now because Durbin and the rest of Team Jackass didn’t consider the possibility that their Congressional mishandling of the economy from 2007 to 2001 might have resulted in a poor economy in 2011. So what happened? Well, the banks still need the revenue – because of the economy – so they’re going to raise debit card fees to make up for it. And the retailers aren’t doing much better – because of the economy – so they’re not racing to lower their retail prices. Assuming that they do it at all. End result? Your monthly expenses are probably about to go up. Hope you have a job! …Oh. Right.

Dems have an amazing amount of faith in their theories, theories which rarely work in the real world. They believe they can increase costs to business through regulation and the affected businesses will simply eat the cost out of their profits. They clearly don't understand business.

Any dollars added to the cost of doing business will eventually end up in the price of that company's products. They have to do that or the company goes out of business. Dems would have them eliminate their profits by eating fees and lowering prices. That's fantasy.

Dem economic theories don't even work in theory, let alone practice.