In an odd WSJ piece today, Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger go on and on about how great it would be if Americans who don’t now use banks (the “unbanked” — at one point, the authors call this group “the heart of America”) would start using them. Why? Because it would supposedly save them lots of money now devoted to check cashing fees and payday loans. So the William J. Clinton Foundation has set up an Economic Opportunity Initiative to help more people enter “the financial mainstream.”

First of all, I wonder why this “Initiative” will suceed more than banks have in the past. After all, banks want customers and are hardly skittish about trying to get people to use their services.

Secondly, the authors seem to suggest that the high cost of payday loans would be eliminated if people had banking accounts, but that’s not so. The payday lending businesses only work with people who do have bank accounts and can write a post-dated check for the amount of their next pay check. Low-income people still have cash-flow problems even if they have bank accounts.

It will be interesting to see how much difference this project has made in, say, five years. I’d bet that the number of the “unbanked” will have hardly changed.