When I first moved to America, I had no credit rating. We don’t want to put more people in the position I was in.

The New York Times reports:

Two senators plan to introduce a bill on Tuesday to impose a tight cap on credit card interest rates, reviving a proposal that is sure to draw howls from banks and other lenders.

A lid on credit card rates has been a white whale of sorts for consumer advocates and others for generations, with efforts falling short during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama. The idea received new life in September when President Trump, then on the campaign trail, said he supported a temporary 10 percent limit on credit card rates “while working Americans catch up.”

That exact cap is contained in Tuesday’s legislation to amend the 1968 Truth in Lending Act, proposed by two senators who aren’t typically ideological allies: Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, and Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. Both separately participated in earlier attempts to impose a cap.

This is a price control — and a particularly stupid one at that. Elsewhere, both Andrew and Dominic have explained why it’s a bad idea economically. I’d like to add a personal anecdote. When I first moved to America, in 2011, my credit rating was zero. This was not because I had been irresponsible back in England, but because there was no way for me to transfer my credit report from the U.K. to the U.S. As a result, as far as Chase and American Express and everyone else was concerned, I was a total unknown.

This was a problem — and a tough one to fix. I needed a credit rating to get an apartment. I needed a credit rating to get a cellphone contract. And I needed a credit rating to get a credit card. There were, of course, some ways around this. Unable to get my own apartment, I sublet from someone whom the owner trusted. Unable to get a cellphone contract, I went with a pay-as-you-go deal. But the credit card? That was more difficult. Yes, I could have just not had one — although, given that I had no cash, I wanted one so that I could manage the delays between owing money for things and getting paid. But, if I didn’t have one, I couldn’t improve my credit rating, and I’d be stuck where I was forever. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. I couldn’t get any credit because I had no credit rating, and I had no credit rating because I had no credit.

To say that I tried everything is an understatement. I sat for hours at Chase and tried to convince them to give me a card. They refused. I tried every other bank near the office. They refused, too. I tried online banks. They refused. Every time, it was the same: either I got an immediate refusal, or I got a notice saying that “more information” was needed, which was followed by a rejection in the mail after a week.

And then . . . a miracle! I found a product from Capital One that was designed for people like me. The deal was this: I’d get a $1,000 credit limit, and Capital One would get $1,000 cash held in escrow and get to charge me 30 percent if I paid late. Obviously, this wasn’t ideal because . . . well, I had no money. In effect, to spend $1,000, I needed to have $2,000 on hand — which took some doing. (The setup reminded me of an old interview I saw with Ringo Starr, in which he said wryly that he understood how unfair life could be when the Beatles made it big and, just at the moment he could finally afford whatever he wanted, he was offered the free drum kits that he’d have killed to get his hands on when he was poor.) But it was what it was. I was a risk, and this offer presented me with a chance to start demonstrating that I could be trusted with credit — even if, to get it, I had to send cash to match the loan and agree to an extremely high interest rate.

Per Dominic, the likely outcome of the Trump-Sanders-Hawley proposal is that banks will:

1. Limit credit-card access only to people with very high credit scores. Even having an average credit score would not cut it for an interest rate of only 10 percent on a short-term, unsecured loan.

2. Require collateral from less creditworthy borrowers. It would become part of a credit-card application to put up assets as collateral to secure the loan, as is typical for other loans with lower interest rates.

Neither of these is helpful to people in the position that I was once in. Limiting “credit-card access only to people with very high credit scores” would mean that those people will not be able to get cards at all. And requiring “collateral from less creditworthy borrowers” would mean that more people would struggle to get their feet on the ladder, as I did. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that I got that deal. But it would have been much better for me if, instead of having to match my credit limit with cash, I could have agreed to a 40, 50, even 90 percent interest rate, kept my $1,000 in the bank, and made sure to pay off the card before it was late. Having had literally no credit history, I was an outlier, and I understood that. Putting more people into that category in the name of “relief” seems like a bizarre goal. In its writeup, the Times says that the idea “is sure to draw howls from banks and other lenders.” But it should also draw “howls” from people who have no — or a bad — credit limit. High interest rates are the price we pay to start building trust. Take them away, and life will get harder, not easier.