I just wanted to clarify--so this is an argument for why banks and CC companies want to drop those who pay every month? It's obvious why the carry-a-balance folks are a gold mine for the banks, but I still haven't heard a good reason to jettison the pay-in-full folks that they already have.

Actually, come to think of it, I think I'm asking the wrong question. Banks don't want to lose the pay-in-full customers. I suppose the banks are betting that most pay-in-full customers will just swallow the change in the terms and just keep charging and racking up those transaction fees, even if they never carry a balance. I bet that if this type of customer rejected the changes and cut up their cards in droves, the banks would back down very quickly. Cash flow is cash flow and when people charged $2 trillion in transactions in '07, you don't want to lose a reliable revenue stream like the pay-in-full crowd. It's like when Time Warner recently flirted with the idea of tiered pricing for Internet service, the public outcry made them scrap that idea very quickly.