GANA

Every system that survives long enough starts to hide its flaws in plain sight.

The payment system is one of them.

Most people swipe a card, tap a phone, or click a button and never think twice. The transaction feels instant, clean, almost invisible. But underneath that simplicity is a structure that quietly shifts cost in one direction and power in another.

Here’s the part almost no one talks about.

When a customer pays with a card, the business pays a fee on the transaction total. Not just the product’s price. The total. That includes sales tax.

Sales tax is not revenue. It never was. It’s government money that businesses are required to collect and pass along. They don’t keep it. They don’t benefit from it. They’re just the middle layer doing the work.

And yet they pay for it.

They pay a private financial system to process public money that they were forced to collect in the first place.

That’s not a glitch. That’s design.

The usual response is to shrug it off. It’s small. It’s built in. It’s just how things work. But those are the same phrases people use to justify every outdated system that no one wants to touch.

Because touching it costs money.

That’s the real issue.

Not feasibility. Not technology. Cost.

Banks and payment networks argue that separating tax from the rest of the transaction is complex. That it would require system changes. That it introduces operational risk. That it’s expensive.

All of that can be true.

And none of it answers the real question.

Why should businesses continue paying fees on money that isn’t theirs just because fixing it is inconvenient?

That argument collapses the moment you apply it anywhere else.

In cybersecurity, you don’t leave a vulnerability exposed because patching it is expensive. You fix it. Because the system demands it. Because the risk is unacceptable.

In infrastructure, you don’t keep using failing components because replacing them disrupts operations. You upgrade them. Because the system evolves or it breaks.

But in financial systems, we’re told to accept something different. We’re told that if a structure benefits the entities that built it, then the cost of changing it becomes a reason not to change it at all.

That’s not logic. That’s protection.

The truth is simpler.

The payment system was built for a world that no longer exists.

There was a time when cards were optional. When cash was dominant. When a business could choose not to participate and still survive. In that world, fees could be framed as the cost of convenience.

That world is gone.

Today, refusing card payments is not a strategy. It’s a liability. Customers expect it. Platforms require it. The entire flow of commerce assumes it. Saying businesses have a choice is like saying they can opt out of the internet.

They can. They just won’t exist for long if they do.

So the premise has changed. The system hasn’t.

What used to be optional is now infrastructure. And infrastructure doesn’t get to operate on outdated assumptions forever.

That’s where the imbalance shows itself.

The government gets its tax in full. No reduction. No adjustment.

Banks and networks collect fees based on the full transaction amount. No exception.

Businesses sit in the middle, absorbing the friction. Not because they designed the system. Not because they benefit from that portion of the transaction. But because they’re the only point in the chain where the cost can land without breaking the flow.

They’ve become the shock absorber.

And like most shock absorbers, they’re expected to take the hit quietly.

SB 26-134 challenges that. Not by tearing the system down, but by forcing it to acknowledge something it has ignored for decades.

You don’t charge fees on money that isn’t part of the business’s earnings.

That’s it. That’s the principle.

Everything else. the complexity, the cost, the system changes. Those are consequences, not counterarguments.

Because here’s the reality no one wants to say out loud.

The system will change. It always does.

The only question is whether it changes because it was pushed or because it finally broke under its own imbalance.

Opponents will warn about ripple effects. They’ll talk about cost shifting, reduced rewards, and new fees appearing elsewhere. And they’re not wrong. Systems don’t lose revenue quietly. They adjust.

But that’s not a reason to preserve a flawed structure.

That’s what happens when you correct one.

Every major system recalibration looks like a disruption in the moment. Then it becomes the new baseline.

The same will happen here.

The deeper issue isn’t really about swipe fees. It’s about control.

Who decides how money moves? Who benefits from that movement? And who carries the cost when the system is no longer aligned with reality?

Right now, that balance is off.

And once you see it clearly, the argument that nothing should change because change is expensive stops making sense.

Everything worth fixing is expensive.

That’s the cost of evolution.

The difference is who’s expected to pay it.

For a long time, that answer has been businesses.

Maybe it’s time that answer changes too.