Consumers in the U.S. are increasingly using credit cards to pay for basic necessities as income gains fail to keep pace with rising food and fuel prices.

The dollar volume of purchases charged grew 10.7 percent in June from a year ago, while the number of transactions rose 6.8 percent, according to First Data Corp.’s SpendTrend report issued this month. The difference probably represents the increasing cost of gasoline, said Silvio Tavares, senior vice president at First Data, the largest credit card processor.

“Consumers, particularly in the lower-income end, are being forced to use their credit cards for everyday spending like gas and food,” said Tavares, who’s based in Atlanta. “That’s because there’s been no other positive catalyst, like an increase in wages, to offset higher prices. It’s a cash-flow problem.”

In what appears to be a gross Obama administration oversight, former Bush administration political officials are still receiving taxpayer-funded credit cards in the mail.

Former DOL official Don Todd, who used to oversee the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) told TheDC that the government sent him a ready-to-activate taxpayer-funded credit card.

Todd, who now works in the private sector at nonprofit Americans for Limited Government (ALG), destroyed the card, but he’s shocked at how he still got one in the mail, years after he left his politically appointed government post. Todd’s last day at the DOL was Jan. 20, 2009. The DOL is still sending him credit cards.

Jokingly, Todd told TheDC that this oversight reminds him of former President Ronald Reagan’s comments about how a government bureau is the “nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

“A government job is a gift that keeps on giving,” Todd joked.

American Express Co. is making its boldest move yet in the prepaid market by introducing a reloadable card that carries almost no fees.

Instead of charging cardholders for activating, reloading or replacing lost cards — standard practice in the prepaid market — the company will make its money on the product primarily from the fees retailers pay when consumers make purchases. Amex's merchant rates traditionally have been higher than those of the other payment networks.

"We thought to ourselves … how could we create a fee-free product and basically make money on the discount rate associated when a customer uses a card at a merchant, either online or offline," Dan Schulman, Amex's group president for enterprise growth, said Monday.

Citigroup waited up to three weeks before notifying credit card customers that their accounts had been hacked, according to a published report Monday.

Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) held off on notifying customers in last month's security breach because the company was conducting an investigation, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Making the news this week, a woman who stole credit cards from a terminally ill patient, and another who ripped off her dead parents.

In previous weeks, stories about credit card crimes in the media have involved petty criminals stealing credit cards from churchgoers and teachers. Apparently, some thieves decided they needed to up the sleaze ante.

The first story is particularly sad. Dora T. Chatmon, 24, was providing in-home care for a terminally-ill woman in Lewiston, N.Y. She and her boyfriend, Leonard James, 19, used the woman's credit cards to make $13,000 in purchases between September 20 and October 12 last year.

Chatmon and James each blamed the other, which somehow makes me think they won't be staying together as a couple, but the judge felt that they both deserved some jail time. They each received four months of weekends in jail, five years' probation and will each have to pay back $6,450.

The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 authorizes a $7,500 tax credit for qualified first-time home buyers purchasing homes on or after April 9, 2008 and before July 1, 2009. The following questions and answers provide basic information about the tax credit.

You have to give the Bush scriptwriters credit. They can come up with the darndest names for their phony, bafflegab campaigns. Their latest is the Dream Act, an amnesty proposal which will hit Congress this week. This bad dream will “officially” creat

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