[quote=briansd1]Would it not be simpler to force them to decline the transactions of people who have no money in the bank?[/quote]
Again, I’m not sure every EFT purchase is preceded by a balance inquiry.

It might be that the database/network costs to do that in the kind of access time we’ve come to expect (approx 3 seconds) would be prohibitive.

I suppose though, we could mandate that behavior and performance, and mandate free checking to say anyone who made less than say $100k, and then pass *all* the costs on to those bastards who make more than $100k.

Or we could nationalize the banks and get the money for all this infrastructure via taxes on the “rich”.