With the economy on a steady but slow increase and employers now paying minimum-wage employees in pre-paid debit cards, banking fees can drain your account — especially if you don’t have sufficient funds.
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So how to rectify this problem? Writing for Slate, Matthew Yglesias suggests an alternate banking system that could move us into the future and allows for us to pinch fewer pennies.
There’s a strong case, I think, for the creation of a “postal banking” system (though I wouldn’t actually want the USPS to do it) in which every American would be given a government-run zero-interest no-fee bank account that came equipped with a debit card and in which employers were legally required to offer direct deposit as an option. People would still end up hit with fees when they wanted to withdraw cash from ATMs, but for bill paying and non-cash transactions they could use the debit card and you’d undercut both the traditional high-fee check-cashing industry and the newfangled high-fee prepaid debit card industry.
Read more at Slate.
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