The new Felix Unger and Oscar Madison odd-couple of politics are Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley. They’ve just teamed up on a bill to cap annual credit-card interest rates at 10%.

Hawley calls current rates “exploitive” and accused card issuers of “hiking their interest rates to the moon.”

This comes from a Senator who labeled Kamala Harris’s economic plan “Soviet price controls” and denounced them as “excruciatingly bad.”

However, capping credit card interest is nothing less than a price control and will result in less consumer credit being offered – especially to younger and poorer Americans.

As for the “lack of competition” argument, there are more than 640 individual credit card products and nearly 4,000 banks today, all competing in the buy-now-pay-later space. The average American household carries 3.9 credit cards, and many consumers opt for upstart competitors that offer lower rates. The smartest pay off their balances – only half of American households with credit cards don’t.

Ironically, a huge booster of the Hawley-Sanders price control bill is Teamsters President Sean O’Brien who says: “You’ve got a lot of our members, our constituents, who are paying 28, 29% on credit cards that they’ll never be able to pay off.”

Ahem, O’Brien is complaining about high rates while his union’s exclusive co-branded credit card has a rate of over 27%.

We hope to see Josh Hawley to back off this bad bill.