business and obama current events

Business Article: Small business owners lobby to cut credit card fees
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/business/smallbusiness/06sbiz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This article talks about the problems that small businesses are having with credit cards. Every time someone uses a credit card to pay for any kind of a small business bill, the business itself is issued a 1.7% charge of the sale price, and a flat rate transaction fee that they have to pay the credit card companies. This extra charge is causing small businesses to lose more and more money because they have to pay the credit card companies when someone uses a card in their business. Last year credit card companies claimed 82.5% of the $61.56 billion dollars in electronic payment fees. Some businesses are claiming anti-trust violations against the Visa and MasterCard network to try and fight these extra charges, but a lot of people agree that if the small businesses don't like it, they can stop accepting credit cards, although that would be a severe problem because not many people pay in cash these days.

I think that the credit card companies are charging the businesses way too much for the use of their cards. I can understand if they issue a smaller charge but I think they're getting out of hand, especially if they are pocketing over 80% of the electronic payments. They are being way too greedy, and could potentially cause some small business that help diversify our economy to go bankrupt.


Obama Article: A Towering Economic To-Do List for Obama
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/business/06challenges.html

This article talks about all of the problems that Obama is going to encounter when he is fully instated as president, such as dealing with our failing economy. It says that he will most likely have problems jump starting consumer spending because people are not spending as much which doesn't help our economy grow, and preventing big organizations such as the Treasury Department from going into debt because of bailouts. Obama and his advisers will most likely start pushing their plans and ideas before he is officially in office. This will hopefully help solve of the current problems, making his future agenda easier to deal with, and it won't allow our economy any more time to flounder.

I think it's good that Obama is going to start trying to make some changes because anything else that Bush will do will probably just cause more problems for Obama in the end. This gives him a head start at doing what he thinks will help out our economy. It would be pretty pointless for Bush to keep doing things if Obama will just undo them in the end. This way, much less time will be wasted, and hopefully they'll be able to get our economy back on track.