Earlier this month, I wrote about Congress' decision to give the credit card companies until 2010 to stop ripping off consumers. That led to this comment from someone calling himself Gary Anderson:

Seriously, if you don't need a great credit score because your aren't going to buy a house or buy a car, just protest this bank slavery by not paying your cards. If everyone stops paying credit cards in the next two years in protest, the banks will tank and we can be free of international bankers. Maybe the government will even kick out the federal reserve bank (a private bank).

Then he linked to a Web site -- DontPayCreditCards.com -- that has more of the same stupid, stupid, stupid ideas.

There are basically two reasons this is really dumb. First, I get that the banks have done evil things. But if you took out a loan and agreed to pay it back, how is reneging on the deal an appropriate way of protesting? Did their gangster tactics force you to take out a loan?


The second problem is that not paying off credit card debt will hurt you a lot more than the banks: It's harder to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy these days, and your credit score will be crushed. Worse, the government has demonstrated a willingness to bailout banks when consumers don't pay up -- but no willingness to bailout consumers when they don't pay up.

All in all, this emerging "Don't pay your credit cards" movement is the dumbest pseudo-protest in history, and consumers would do well to ignore it.

Sometimes you have to admit it: The banks have you, and the best thing to do is pay up as soon as you can and then never make the mistake of carrying a balance on a credit card again.