And once you get into grad school they teach that those nice little graphs you drew in high school and undergrad were simplifications of the real world, and whether costs are passed on or not is very dependent on the specifics of the market. And then you hit the real world and realize, it's even more complex again when the costs are felt for some subset of transactions and not others, there are multiple parties to a transaction, etc etc.

Often, a high school education is not enough.

So then they found a magic way of inventing free money that conjures money from thin air, without any costs being passed down, according to you.

If they figured that out, then why not set the price to 1 million dollars per transaction?

Zero percent of the costs aren't passed down according to you.

With the extra tax revenue from this magic money machine, we could solve the national debt problem overnight!

Yes, exactly. Free money from the sky is exactly it.

It's definitely not coming out of card issuers pockets, from their fat interchange fees, that they may be happy to pay due to reduced fraud and other costs. Nope, the free sky money thing is it.

That high school education is serving well.