Where's a free market when you need one?

My credit card company recently informed me that they were raising the APR on my card to 30%, and raising a bunch of other nuisance fees, and if I didn't like it, I could kindly close my account.

This wasn't a surprise; I'd heard about this on Marketplace a day or two earlier. Also, I pay off my balance in full every month, so changes in "pay up bitch" charges are background noise to me most of the time.

I'm noticing this now because this is quite clearly evil. I don't mean like people who don't use their turn signals are evil. I mean soul-blackening evil. Like lotteries, these are tools that unrepentantly greedy people use to pull money out of those with poor judgment. For people who are already deeply in debt, the best thing to do is deepen that hole for them, right?

Under most circumstances, my solution would be the nuclear option: No credit cards. Problem solved. However, while I wouldn't call credit cards in American society necessary, they are handy. They let you do things, especially online, that you couldn't get done other ways. So this needs a more tactical solution.

This morning in the shower (where the water is more innovative) I decided that we need a credit card company that isn't in business to gouge. I'm not saying you lose money. I'm just saying, somebody needs to start a credit card that isn't wildly usurous.

From a cursory examination, there's no one out there in credit cards competing on price. Right now, if I had a credit card that only charged, say, 9% interest, people would flock to use it. They would transfer balances to my dinky 9% credit card. I would still make truckloads of money, and I might not even fall that far behind the big boys.

This isn't just capitaltruism, this is smart business, catering to an unserved share of the market.

Bailout Solution Update

In the shower a couple of days ago, I realized the missing element of my bailout solution (which should pump $375 billion back into the U.S. economy, while loosening the shackles on America's best educated, most responsible citizens).

This is probably why Mr. Paulson has not yet contacted me, but now he's pretty much got no choice but to pass my blog address onto Tim Geithner.

Here's the New New Deal:

Instead of pure loan forgiveness, the U.S. treasury offers compensatory service hours. Essentially, you freelance for debt reduction. If you're willing to make this your full-time pursuit, then you get a decent stipend, and work off your debt much faster.

If you are something particularly useful, like a civil engineer, you get an above-market hourly "wage" in debt reduction for time spent on redesigning our road infrastructure.

If you're less skilled, then you get a lower hourly return in debt reduction, but still a better "wage" than you could make at your run-of-the-mill fresh-out-of-college job.

This complicates the matter, and will require some fine tuning to make it an attractive option, but it needs to be generous so that the best and most indebted people will choose it.

So, let's review. Money is pumped into the economic system, not at the top, where we hope it will create solvency through a Rube Goldberg spit-and-hope trickle-down process, but at the bottom where it will directly affect the piston of the economic engine, i.e. the workers.

In exchange for this money, U.S. education and infrastructure get competent boosts from educated, hungry professionals. And then a bunch of dumb shit pork doesn't have to get funded.

Yuh huh, we can.

I'm No Superman

Yesterday morning in the shower (where the water is more creative) I was thinking about how much of my interior life contains cartoon cues. When I'm angry, I imagine a steam whistle burst out the top of my head. When something smells bad, I expect stink lines radiating from it. When I want to move fast, I imagine that I pedal the air for a second and leave a dust cloud behind.

Then I thought, "This would be a good premise for a half-hour comedy program. Just have the main characters react in ways that are hand-drawn animated. But it would have to be done with caution... it's easy to take over-the-top too far." I walked around with that idea for a while.

Then I watched the Scrubs Season 1 DVD my lovely wife got me for Valentine's Day, and it was like, "Oh, well I guess they sort of already did this." And then I also remembered Parker Lewis Can't Lose neither of which is exactly like my idea, but they both come close.

My point, before I lose it completely, is that oh my sweet baby Moses is Scrubs funny. If this show was a person, you would accuse me of being a suck-up, because I laugh at everything it says.

I laugh out loud at even the only slightly funny jokes, and the really funny ones have me stopping the DVD player so I can laugh and repeat the line out loud several times and then laugh some more and then go to another room and regain my composure and then come back and watch the scene again and laugh again, but not quite as hard the second time.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is that it's full of jerks. Funny jerks. I first noticed this watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but maybe you noticed sooner than that--jerks are funny. You didn't notice? This probably says something awful about me. Probably something obvious that I'm just missing.

Even the nice characters you root for are occasionally funny jerks here, and the full-time jerks are most of the reason to watch the show. Dr. Cox's lines are so well written, I want to copy them into a notebook.

We're only five or six episodes into the season, and haven't watched any extras or commentaries, but I see myself sucking on this thing like a pixie stick, trying to learn how they make this show so funny.