aleksl - 11:40 pm on Jan 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

tangor: There is nothing "burdensome" in the world of financial transactions. If you don't like the fee charged, FIND A DIFFERENT PROCESSOR (that's capitalism).

no tangor, when all processors charge the same 2% TAX "fee", it is not capitalism. It is monopoly-like oligarchy, socialism if you wish. Capitalism is when there's competition for being MY PROCESSOR (I create business, I create wealth for THEM, they should beat a path to my door with offers), and competition creates lower and lower prices. In this case, there's none. Sorry, you made it political, but seem to be rusty on definitions.

I don't want to make it a political question, but I will make one more point, hope this doesn't strike moderators as offtopic.

Imagine it is not a 2% per transaction "fee", but only 1%. In my world, it means I can stop working 10 hour days and instead can hire additional employee. Probably the same is true for 10,000 other ecommerce businesses out there. That is 10,000 REAL JOBS - right there. So what do we loose by doing that? The money VISA, MasterCard and others are collecting aren't going back as taxes, these are offshore entities that hide profits. The same entities that do "leveraged buy-outs" i.e. buy american companies with offshore money and "make them profitable" i.e. fire americans and move manufacturing to China. I see these examples every month. So, less offshore money for them, more money to local businesses, higher employment, etc.

Now imagine it is less than 1%, or even a fixed monthly fee. You and I run software companies, we know what it takes to pass secure bytes from one computer to the other - it DOES NOT take a 2% charge for every transaction processed anywhere in the world.