A Modest Proposal to Help Fix the Economy

Have the Federal Reserve start issuing credit cards. Seriously.

One of the big whines of the economists is that consumer credit is nearly frozen. That can be fixed by the Federal Reserve Credit Card. Of course, they would need an operation that is already in place to take in payments from consumers and pay the merchants, so we would co-opt the IRS into that job.

The top rate on the FRCC would be 10%. Balance transfers would be permitted, so those consumers who are carrying a huge balance on their credit cards would be able to reduce much of the debt burden that they are saddled with. People who have huge balances and interest rates of 30% (or higher) would stand a better chance of paying that down and fixing their lives short of bankruptcy.

Default on the FRCC and the default is transformed into a tax lien, which the IRS is very good at enforcing.

The banks won't like this, but fuck them. The Treasury department has given those souless vampires hundreds of billions of dollars in cash under the TARP, with the hope that the banks would start lending again, and the banks have done nothing other than sit on the cash and hand out huge bonuses to their executives.

The FRCC could do a lot to fix the economy and, when things got better, the FRCC could close new charges on the cards and fold up shop entirely once the charges were all paid off.

(Oh, and when I refer to bankers as "vampires," I don't mean the nice cuddly ones from the"Twilight" series. I mean the evil bloodsuckers that Buffy the Vampire Slayer mowed down by the thousands.)