Lipstick on a postal pig

I can't help but share this lunacy with you. The (American) Center For Economic and Policy Research thinks that the problem with the US Postal Service isn't the lackadaisical, contemptuous, inefficient distribution of mail which it perpetrates. It's just not properly utilized. Instead, we should allow it to run banking services at the same efficiency with which it delivers mail:

[...] the Postal Service could improve its finances by expanding rather than contracting. Specifically, it can return to providing basic banking services, as it did in the past and many other postal systems still do. This course has been suggested by the Postal Service's Inspector General.
This route takes advantage of the fact that the Postal Service has buildings in nearly every neighborhood in the country. These offices can be used to provide basic services to a large unbanked population that often can't afford fees associated with low balance accounts. As a result they often end up paying exorbitant fees to check cashing services, pay day lenders and other non-bank providers of financial services.

Of course, the reason that banks have run a mile from providing banking services to clients with low income or dubious immigration status, running away from a steady (albeit low) income stream, is due to... government regulatory pressure. Who'd have thought that the government would have caused these problems?

Now the CEPR is proposing that a government agency can step in and fix the very real problems in banking access that other government agencies have created. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Incidentally, my personal experience with sending mail through the USPS - a monthly mail to a residential address within the same state, dropped in a regular post box - is that the failure rate is about 1 in 13. This is corroborated by the experience of The Advice Goddess (Los Angeles resident Amy Alkon, if you're not reading her blog or buying her books then you really should):

How sucko is @USPS? Called to complain re lazy postal wkrs not picking up from blue boxes; USPSer says "I'd never put mail in one of those"

— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) November 5, 2014

There is no way that the USPS could comply with the existing banking regulations in the USA without having the same order of overhead as the major US banks. I suspect their savings in property costs are insignificant; even if they could train existing post office counter staff to be bank tellers as well without any major salary inflation, all the backend systems and personnel required would kill their cost advantage. Check out the USPS compensation and benefits: "regular salary increases" means you're paid by length of service, not productivity, they get federal health benefits which are a step or three above Obamacare coverage, and they get a defined benefit retirement plan. Believe me, if you're staff at a major bank, you would sell your mother on the streets to get these benefits.

All the CEPR is doing in this article is lobbying for an increase in (unionized) federal government employees. The government, and therefore the taxpayer, is going to pick up the tab, but that's Just Fine with them. The only way I can see this working is if the USPS is exempted from most of the existing banking regulations - and if that's the problem, why not just repeal them for everyone else as well?