Credit cards and their role in personal finances have become so central to American life we lose sight of their evolution. There was actually a time before credit cards, when cash or personal checks were accepted as payments. As credit cards became acceptable at many businesses, you were required to subscribe to their in-house cards. Then, as I was graduating from college in the late 1960s, I began receiving cards which were issued in my name despite never applying for or requesting them. They usually arrived loaded with pre-approved credit limits in the hundreds of dollars.

Twenty years later, once student loans poured dollars into student pockets, unsolicited credit cards were delivered to the campus mailboxes of freshmen. Seventeen-year-old students mingled their binge drinking with binge spending and the fiscal consequences were exactly what you would expect – credit card balances matching loan balances at graduation. A pair of technology developments reshaped the credit card marketplace during the 1990s. Access to the early internet made it possible to receive bank approval for charges just as the nation’s largest financial institutions were waking to the sizeable profits they could rake up by simply processing transactions.

At the height of the American credit card tsunami, I held more than two dozen cards with my preferred retailers. I still keep two gasoline accounts after 50 years, largely because they provide a guarantee against car troubles when I’m far from home. A recent sidewall puncture required $257 to replace a tire. I didn’t need cash late at night and, let’s face it, attempting to pass a personal check raises eyebrows in the 21st century. My credit cards are reduced to fewer than a half dozen as the banking industry has consolidated cards. Synchrony Bank (whoever they are), Capital One, Chase, American Express, Mastercard and Visa now provide universal coverage. Better yet, for small retailers, they guarantee payment once a charge has been approved. Collections are the responsibility of the credit card manager/issuer.

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Major credit card companies skim 2% to 5% off the top of each transaction as a service fee, which is cheaper than operating an internal billing department for most large businesses. Mastercard and Visa are more than willing to issue branded cards for their largest customers – thus a Macy’s American Express account. This doesn’t work as well for small businesses or independent artisans, who are more dependent on prompt and reliable cash flow. We’ve all encountered farmer’s market vendors who will knock 5% to 10% off their prices for cash purchases. It’s a safe bet you probably won’t report those payments to the IRS. Neither will they.

In order to distinguish one card from another, retailers offer a wide variety of reward programs – the most popular being frequent flyer miles. My twin brother, Richard Hudson, taught mathematics at the University of South Carolina for 35 years, winning several international prizes for his work with prime numbers. For nearly 20 years he never purchased an airline ticket with anything other than his credit card rewards, rotating thousands of dollars among multiple accounts in a form of “three-card monte” that permitted him to accumulate prodigious mileage balances. He played a similar game with time-share rentals.

Richard taught a popular course, “Theoretical Mathematics,” which told me he knew things I didn’t. Conducting these kinds of fiscal games requires far more attention than I’m willing to devote to them. I’ve settled for letting my Thank You rewards, which are both difficult and time consuming to track, be converted into credits to my Amazon Prime account. With billions, perhaps trillions of dollars sloshing through the credit card industry, it should come as no surprise it periodically attracts the attention of Congress – not for taxation, as you might suspect, but for a division of the spoils. The nation’s largest retailers, where credit charges can exceed a billion dollars daily, a half-percent savings on credit purchases amounts to tens of millions of dollars.

Dick Durbin, Senate Democratic Majority Whip, presents himself as a dogged defender of consumers. Truth be told, consumers only have a tangential interest in this tug-of-war between marketplace thieves. Durbin’s previous credit card “reform” in 2006 funneled $23 billion to “big box” retailers. His current legislation, which tampers once more with transaction agreements, threatens reward programs while undermining the fraud protections paid for by issuers while strangling access to credit for 10 million to 15 million low-income families. Not a single consumer organization supports his legislation. The minuscule savings Durbin touts are no more likely to be passed on to consumers in 2023 than they were in 2006.

A thriving fiscal ecosystem has been nurtured by the competition between issuers. Durbin, a pro-choice champion on the abortion question, appears intent on shrinking credit options for his voters. Wielding his clout as assistant majority leader, he and co-sponsor, Sen. Rob Marshall, have slipped their proposal into the 2024 Military and Veterans Affairs Construction Appropriations Act as an amendment. Why? Because it’s difficult for members to vote against funding our troops, past and current.

Miller Hudson is a public affairs consultant and a former Colorado legislator.