They tax our entire economy at X rate, while maintaining their infrastructure only requires Y cost ... and X is significantly higher than Y.

From the actual article:

> The payment processor keeps 0.35% ($0.35), then pays 2% ($2.00) to the cardholder’s issuing bank and 0.15% ($0.15) to Visa. The 2% is the interchange fee, commonly known as interchange. The 0.15% is the network assessment fee. 8

In other words, they get 0.35% of every transaction ... and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network.

middlemanning is the most american of business ventures

> and it does not require anything close to that to maintain their network.

If it's so easy to disrupt visa/mastercard payment network, they wouldn't be able to charge this much. Payment is a highly competitive business. We witnessed so many payment companies went under or were bought out, but these two stay for years and are still profitable.

The truth is their moat is considered very durable and hard to build. A global n banks to n banks payment network is not as simple as how people thought.

That 0.35% feels more reasonable in 1976 or even maybe 2001 than it does today because technology changed so much. But maybe I'm wrong about that

If you're an American that 2% is a much bigger problem for your society. That's a direct funnel from the poor to the wealthy, it's not as a obvious a problem as "Trump gave the ultra-rich a tax cut" but it might structurally be more significant.

Credit card companies are mostly parasitic middle men but I have a credit card that I use for most payments and pay off the balance every month and effectively get 2% cashback with no interest costs.

Goods (and services) are priced at what the customer is willing to pay. In this case, the alternative is cash or cheques, both have much higher loss rates. That’s why vendors are eager to take visa over cash.