Members of Parliament can be blamed for all manner of things that cost us money, time, temper and despair.

They nodded through Gordon Brown's first Budget that knocked the stuffing out of what had been a solvent and much-envied array of occupational pensions.

Over the years they then nodded through another nine Brown Budgets which cumulatively gave us the world's second most complicated tax system.

The World Bank says so, anyway. Pre-Brown, ten years ago, Britain's company tax law ran to 3,700 pages -and there was a "task force" tasked to translate it into plain English. Now there are 8,300 pages and no news of the task force. Only India has more, according to the World Bank, with the after-thought that "no one individual can possibly read it all".

Blame MPs for this, and for much else besides. That is how democracy is supposed to work.

One thing that is not their fault, though, is the Farepak collapse. It has cost tens of thousands of prudent-minded individuals money they were saving up for Christmas.

Hopefully we shall discover in due course whose fault this was, whether it was a swindle, or plain vanilla mismanagement.

Yet one thing is clear now.

Parliament had nothing to do with it. Just this once our MPs are guiltless. So award the prize for the silly suggestion of the week to Ian McCartney, the Trade Minister. He urged his fellow legislators yesterday to "take the high moral ground" and chip in a day's pay for the victims of Farepak.

There are said to be 150,000 of them. According to my pocket calculator, a day's pay from every MP, plus a bit extra from Ministers would produce about £150,000 - say £1 for every loser.

The financial irrelevance of this will not worry Mr McCartney. The attraction of his stunt lies less in any material benefit for people who have lost money, than that MPs who refuse to join in can be pilloried" - many of them will be Tories.

The pity about the Farepak affair is the damage it does to the old-fashioned concept of saving up for a future expense rather than brandishing a credit card when the time comes, vaguely to sort out the mess afterwards. It comes just as we are paying back more credit card debt than we are taking on - to the tune of £2.7 billion since January, according to Alliance & Leicester.

It is clear, though, that the banks are providing against much more than that this year as bad and doubtful debts.

It was £3.6 billion last year and has certainly got worse since.

Yet not all of this was necessarily unprofitable, let alone reckless lending. The American magazine Business Week has run a detailed account of how one card company there offered new credit cards to people who were over the limit or behind with minimum payments on those they already had. Repeated penalties were intended to offset losses on generally modest lending.

The Financial Services Authority may have been on target when it ordered British card issuers to link penalties to the cost of recovering their money.