This chart refutes the all-out lobbying push from big retailers to impose price controls on credit card swipe fees – a proposal that would kill most reward programs and cause a lot of lower income Americans to lose access to credit cards.

Merchants point to overall rising TOTAL fees paid – but not, crucially, the other two series shown here: overall card volume and the swipe fee as a percentage. It’s been close to flat and has risen less than associated rewards programs expenditures even as fraud protection has become much more sophisticated.

Retailers are free to impose surcharges or cash discounts, but most of them know they do better with credit cards, even merchants who pay more than the average fee of 1.6%. Government price controls, as always, would cause more harm than good, as our paper showed. We are working on an updated study, because this issue doesn’t seem to go away.