I bitch at Ched the dunderhead a lot, so I try to make a conscious effort to be fair when the occasion warrants: I do think the ability to buy honor bars and the like with points is a long-overdue and good addition. Absent this change, a lot of those things just weren't ever going to be available and earning new merit points becomes difficult at a certain point.
The bad: I don't think price increases are the move here, despite their modest nature. As has been pointed out a billion times already, player incomes were decimated by the Pawn Shop Debacle; raising prices, even modestly, in the face of falling incomes is a terrible idea.
The questionable: The Brain Trust has indicated that their "fix" to this would be to address the oversupply. I'm not quite sure this does much to address that, frankly. While you will get a number of players spending +10 points per day relative to before, that's not a huge amount. Outside of Energy and Nerve, it was my understanding that the rest of those purchase options were seldom used to begin with; making them slightly more expensive seems unlikely to change that. So, overall I kind of question whether this "fix" is going to be enough to soak up the oversupply and it certainly does very little to fix the price collapse that's ravished the Torn economy over the past 3 months. For now, enjoy the bubble and don't be on the wrong side when it pops!