Bernie Sanders’ Brilliant Plan to Turn Post Offices into Banks
By James Woods, Uncut, October 20, 2015
Bernie Sanders, the candidate urging Americans to have a “political revolution,” is suggesting a revolutionary idea that undoubtedly has Wall Street seething with fury.
Following up on his campaign platforms like a $15 an hour minimum wage and closing corporate tax loopholes, Sanders is now suggesting we turn post offices into banks.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last year, the Vermont senator first suggested postal banking as a way to help save the jobs of the more than 500,000 people employed by the United States Postal Service. As Sanders wrote, postal banking could also help provide financial services for people with limited access to bank branches.
“If you are a low-income person, it is, depending upon where you live, very difficult to find normal banking. Banks don’t want you. And what people are forced to do is go to payday lenders who charge outrageously high interest rates. You go to check-cashing places, which rip you off. And, yes, I think that the postal service, in fact, can play an important role in providing modest types of banking service to folks who need it.”
Along with nationalized healthcare and paid family leave, postal banking is yet another idea popular throughout the world that has somehow never found a foothold here in America. It is believed that up to 40% of people in America currently have to rely on privatized and punitive check-cashing facilities just to cash their paycheck at the end of the week — either their location or financial history prohibits them from going to a bank.
In a radio interview with Ed Schultz on Wednesday, Sanders explained just how much revenue this could generate for the USPS as they continue to battle back from the brink of extinction.
“A new report from the Postal Service suggests one way the agency could make as much as $8.9 billion in annual revenue would be to offer limited banking services like cashing checks and selling pre-paid debit cards. The USPS already takes in more than $100 million in revenue each year by selling postal money orders. One of the areas we should be looking at is banking.”
One of Sanders’ chief goals as president is to break up the big commercial banks responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, but his goal of establishing postal banks isn’t getting nearly as much play as it should. Sanders’ postal banking idea could simultaneously strengthen the USPS and give much needed relief to those who exist on the fringe of financial services access. It would also serve to provide the big banks some competition in the free market they claim to love.
More importantly, postal banking would mean lower service rates and fees for everyone, regardless of if they banked at a post office or not. A proposal, even from a socialist, that would make the “free market” a freer market should theoretically be appealing to even the most ardent libertarian disciples of Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman. What’s not to love?
James Woods ( AKA – JamesFromTheInternet) is an independent journalist based in New York City who can be reached on twitter @JamesFTInternet or via email: jamesftinternet@gmail.com
