Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.
Speaking of underbanked Americans without access to safe, low-cost services for cashing checks and saving money…
Don’t miss “Bernie Sanders’s Highly Sensible Plan to Turn Post Offices Into Banks” – The Atlantic:
…only about 7 percent of the world’s national postal systems don’t offer some bank-like services.
[…]
The reason why this would be so useful in the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services, which in some places charge usurious rates that send people into spirals of recurring debt.
[…]
…in 1910, William Howard Taft introduced a postal-savings system for new immigrants and the poor that lasted until 1967.
Low-grade localized socialism we can believe in! (And a new revenue stream for our constitutionally mandated postal service.)
