I saw an article about banking policy

Context
I ran across this article in the Shreveport Times this morning about the Federal Reserve and Congress trying to determine the best method for regulating debit card fees, as mandated by last year's financial overhaul bill. The difficulty appears to be in getting merchants and banks to share the pain equitably.

Commentary
As far as I can tell from the article, the banks are saying they shouldn't be limited on how much they charge merchants for debit card swipes because they play an important role in the economic recovery effort and merchants are saying they need a break on these fees because they play an important role in the economic recovery effort. Taking this bait, federal officials seem to be trying to decide which of the two factions' role is more important. I think this approach is wrongheaded because both the merchants and the banks make compelling cases in this regard.

Here's another thing both parties are doing: they're trying desperately to hide these fees from the consumer. The merchants are saying when they pay high debit card swipe fees, they have to either charge customers more for goods, which may lose them customers, or cut their profit margins, which means cutting jobs. Bankers say if they have to cover the costs of fraud protection, etc. themselves, they'll have to eliminate free checking accounts which, you guessed it, may lose them customers. Neither seems to want to say directly to the consumer, "The convenience of using a debit card at the grocery store has a cost; please pay it."

Ellen Ruppel Shell, in her excellent book Cheap: the high cost of discount culture, says this is a common problem in our current culture: we have become so obsessed with "getting a good deal" that no one wants to pay the fair price for anything. Shell mostly talks about how we ignore substandard goods and/or substandard working conditions in order to fuel this overriding need, but I think the paradigm applies to other situations as well.

So I would like to propose that we take the honest approach: the Federal Reserve should determine how much a debit card swipe at a merchant costs and the banks should charge the consumers that amount per swipe. Then we could actually make (Gasp!) informed decisions about whether the convenience is worth that price instead of everybody trying to fool each other about what's going on.

What did you see today?