Can the Government Help With Credit Card Debt?

After what appears in retrospect to be decades of shamefully lax restrictions upon revolving lines of credit, the ever rising tide of irritation among the electorate regarding the absence of governmental guidelines regulating the unsecured consumer finance merchants led to the swift and relatively uncontroversial passage of the CARD Act legislation during the first few months of 2010 despite the best efforts of the multi national lending institutions (the so called super banks supposedly too big to fail) and their exceedingly well subsidized political action committees.
As federal oversight endeavors go, the CARD Act was almost irritatingly gentle and the dozen or so changes to the laws so specific and disparate and difficult for the lay person to comprehend.
Even when compared to the always murky realm of credit reports and credit card debt - information on FICO and Beacon scores guarded as tightly as nuclear secrets - an elaboration of the CARD Act required so much contextual background that the media did not take much interest in illuminating a story covering government help with credit card debt without easily grasped headlines.
Although the practical consequences of such alterations would scarcely be noticed by even those debtors owing tens of thousands of dollars to Big Credit, the corporate lenders initially balked at the notion of any attempts by the government to reign in their worst tendencies: introductory rates for balance transfers that would barely last the first month, to use one particularly gruesome example formerly permitted by the Federal Trade Commission.
For a bit, they went ahead and froze access to the accounts of poor risk applicants and temporarily diminished the balances of clients who had previously never taken advantage of sizable spending limits as their statistical prognosticators calculated the financial ramifications of the new credit card debt information.
Soon enough, the powers that be realized the minimal safeguards would hardly disrupt the massive profitability of unsecured lines of credit boasting Annual Percentage Rates hovering around twenty percent and structurally designed to never be wholly remunerated.
At the end of the day, even those economic advisers pushing for dramatically more stringent regulatory safeguards for consumers would have to agree that the most potent aspect of the CARD Act lies more in the symbolic importance of our national representatives on the national stage at last taking some control of the unsecured charge accounts - however feeble this first step may have been - that have slowly but surely come to dominate financial decision making among ordinary consumers.
Whether or not the economic recovery dulls the passion of the electorate to insist that their legislative proxies in Washington enact more sweeping limitations or whether the CARD Act inspires new momentum for government help with credit card debt accounts, only the most blindly cynical observers would try to deny the beneficial undertones of consumer dissatisfaction with credit card company terms of lending.
Honestly, no matter if the popular shift toward responsible budgeting was nothing more than a momentary flash in the pan, the value of United States currency and the health of our domestic financial markets have already enjoyed the sorely needed boost that resulted from elevated global perception of American households.
In fact, based upon this most recent turn of events, one could argue that a coherent, unafraid, and far reaching plan to formalize government help with credit card debt dependence should be our nation's top priority above all else.