Saturday, July 26, 2008

Name the Unintended Consequences...Credit Card Reporting

Flying around the blogs is the story that the new housing bail-out bill contains a provision that all credit card transactions must be automatically submitted to the IRS. This begs the following questions:
  1. What will be the unintended consequences of this, if passed into law? Fewer e-Bay transactions? Less readable purchase descriptions on your credit statement? More readable?
  2. I would guess there are somewhere around a billion transactions per day. Can they really do anything practically useful with that information?
  3. What does this have to do with housing? I know, riders need not matter.
  4. Can they make the data available to economists? Pretty please?

No comments: