I think this is disingenuous framing.

Credit card rewards are not a mechanism to shift wealth towards premium card holders (this is a negligible distraction), they exist purely to increase revenue/conversion rate, by decreasing customer price sensitivity (compared to cash payments) and encouraging financially irresponsible spending. If this did not actually work in practice, every merchant would just insist on cash and pocket the difference.

"Poor people" are hurt much more from the changes in spending behavior induced by credit card use than by paying for card rewards.

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diego_moita 15 hours ago | parent [-]

You are an economist, aren't you?

I suspect that because I didn't understand what you wrote.

You used a lot of passive voice and complex jargon. That is economists favorite writing style: they write to confuse, not to explain.

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myrmidon 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> You are an economist, aren't you?

No. I do embedded software engineering for a living.

I use (in my view) HN appropriate levels of jargon (because lots of people here are involved with getting people to pay for some newfangled cloud thing or other, so I use their terminology).

In simple words: People pay more for the same (and spend more recklessly) when you let them pay by credit card, and this causes much more economical "damage" to poor peolpe than any "wealth transfer from card rewards".

	▲	diego_moita 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, it is better now.