[quote=briansd1]
Nobody is disputing that a large percent of the population has financial management problems. But isn’t it our society’s job to help them?
[/quote]
Wow. You have a lot of jobs for our society.

[quote=briansd1]
If someone has only $1 in the bank, and overdraws the account by mistake at McDonald’s, how is it to our society’s benefit to allow the bank to charge them $20 overdraft fee? Simply decline the transaction and be done with it.
[/quote]
I think the balance is not always checked, perhaps for speed. I can easily imagine it is more expensive to process an overdraft after the fact. I suppose we could mandate that all the banking and POS software in the world be changed to check the balance before hand. Even then, could you have a race condition where another check cleared between the balance check and the new debit? You could still have overdrafts.

[quote=briansd1]
To me, free basic banking is the same as free over-the-air broadcast
[/quote]
The same? Adding extra listeners/viewers doesn’t add incremental costs. No customer service, etc. It’s not even CLOSE to “the same”.

[quote=briansd1]
and universal lifeline telephone.
[/quote]
That isn’t free is it?

[quote=briansd1]
It wouldn’t be necessary if employers were required to pay in cash if the employees so chose.

When check payments are obligatory, banks get an automatic stream of customers which they prey upon.[/quote]
Well, you have a point there. But, jeez is it THAT hard? We had banks even in the wild west frontier days, and people seemed to figure it out somehow. Have we gotten stupider, and should we pander to that? Life is pretty cushy compared to how it was 200 years ago, do we really have to act as if everyone is completely helpless? Like we’re those chubby folks in WALL-E? Don’t citizens have any obligation to the society to get their act together?