Missing the point.

Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided to limit the swipe fees that merchants pay when someone uses a debit card.  Okay, sounds good, right?  Banks were making a metric shitton of cash off the operation because they did it in such a way that made the customer never even realize it was there.  They assess the fee to the merchant, then under the merchant agreement, prohibit the merchant from assessing those fees to the customer.  I.e. the merchant can't say, "oh, you're using a debit card, let me add $0.45 to your bill".

So the merchant is forced basically to raise his prices across the board, for everyone.  The price goes up no matter how you pay.  He's got to recoup that money somehow.

By all accounts, those fees were pretty exorbitant, and were in fact one of the biggest money making mechanisms for the big banks.  There's really little cost to them in operating the system, so all those little fees add up to big profits that essentially subsidized the not-so-profitable traditional banking services they provide.  This allows them to attract more customers with free checking, better savings rates, etc.  Those customers will then use their new debit card to give them more fees and the cycles continues to grow.

So yes, some "solution" needed to be put in place to keep banks from gouging customers, and more importantly help keep "non-customers" (i.e. the cash and check toting folks) paying for their profits.  However, the solution that Congress enacted was completely the wrong one.  By abruptly ending a large source of profits for the banks, the banks are scrambling to make that money up.  We saw the $5 debit card fees pop up, which in reality is an okay solution... charge the people that use the service.  However, all the customers balked at that (whaddaya mean we got to pay for a service we use???) and the banks have retreated.  Any minute now though, the banks are going to come up with some other method of making up that cash, and chances are it isn't going to be transparent.

So what should Congress have done?  They should have let capitalism do what capitalism does best.  Despite its flaws, there are some things it does really well.  They should let customers decide what transaction fees they are comfortable with, on both credit and debit cards.  They should simply make it compulsory for the merchants to pass all those fees directly on to the customer.  Let the customer see exactly what every swipe is costing them.  This opens the market to competition by directly pitting the banks against each other.  Oh this bank charges me $0.45 + 1% for each transaction?  That's okay, I only use the card for big purchases.  This one charges me a flat 3% with no minimum?  Cool, that'll save me money because I'm always buying packs of gum...

So, I urge Congress to rethink how they attempted to fix the issue with swipe fees, and to do so in a way that takes advantage of the perks in the capitalist system.

Not to mention, it would get rid of all those "Minimum credit card purchase: $5.00" signs.