Unintended Consequences

News reports last week touted a victory for consumers in the passage of the credit card bill – a new law that attempts to put some constraints on 'greedy' credit card companies and make it a little less difficult to get into big financial trouble with past due bills and interest rates. To my mind it really didn’t do that much to help the terminally stupid credit card abusers, but it IS expected to do a whole lot of damage to those of us who pay our bills on time and don’t run up big finance charges - they call us 'Deadbeats' in the business. The banks have already declared that, with the passage of this bill, us ‘deadbeats’ are now going to have to pay our share of fees and extra charges – to make up for what this bill will cost them in lost fees and charges from those the bill is designed to protect. I guess they don’t really care where the money is going to come from, as long as it comes to them in ever increasing amounts.

And our lobbyist-funded legislators seem more than happy to make sure it does.

(Is anyone else enjoying the irony of our taxes going to bail out companies who, in turn, are using those same tax dollars to hire lobbyists to make sure they can continue to rip off the taxpayers?)

So here’s the problem: Every single piece of legislation or new policy decision carries the risk – more likely the certainty – that there will be unintended consequences resulting. Let’s subsidize farmers to grow corn for ethanol – surprise! Food prices skyrocketed. Let’s pretend that it doesn’t matter if we loan money to people who have no hope of paying it back – surprise! Did we all just lose 40% of our net worth? Gee. Let’s ‘believe in’ Global Warming – it will be swell. We can declare a whole bunch of taxpayer dollars designated to ‘create Green Jobs’ – never mind that we don’t know what those would look like or to whose private pockets all that money will really go. So far it seems to be going to hire the ‘down and out’ to clean up parks and stuff – after the largest portion is skimmed off the top to pay ‘administrators’ and ‘contractors.’ Now there’s something that is going to add significantly to our GNP and pull us out of this recession!

Our elected officials – state and federal – are pumping out such legislation at an amazing rate. They have to. They are going to have to run for office again on their ‘record.’ And goodness knows they need to be reelected in order to get the big payoffs that people in power enjoy.

Maybe those consequences were actually intended?