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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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It should be obvious from basic efficient market processes that every measurable category of people the credit card companies can subdivide people into is internally profitable without needing subsidization, otherwise they wouldn't serve those people at those interest rates.

There are scenarios where this wouldn't necessarily be true. For example, very rich people tend to be politically influential so a little bit of loss on them might be a strategy for looser regulations elsewhere. It doesn't even have to be bribery, just hoping for subconscious good will.

Another way would be that the very rich people are often major business owners, they're slightly biased to picking the card they mainly use personally for their companies too and the CC companies determined the increased chance of making a small fraction of billions of dollars of transactions is worth a small loss on the CEO's class personal spending. This would not be unreasonable, the very rich elites get lots of free gifts and goodies from various companies for that exact reason after all.