Anybody reading the Wall Street Journal this morning may have had to check the calendar. It felt like a cross between April Fools’ and Halloween. The article in question exists here, and it reads like it belongs in a Highlights magazine. How many things can you find wrong with this picture? But since you may need a password to read the article, let me summarize a few things that annoyed at first blush:

  • Obama is going after unbanked households. Next he’ll be going after low-banked households.
  • A new initiative was launched to assist Americans without checking or savings accounts. I didn’t have such accounts for awhile, and I survived. The check cashing fees were competitive with bank fees, and having cash in-hand sure beat what seemed like randomly-generated surprise processing holds, debit card freezes, and costly teller errors.
  • The administration wants to bring banking to low-income and underserved populations. That means, people are using cash, and government can’t track their purchases, for whatever snoopy purpose.
  • The program is for poor “populations in the US and emerging countries.” Not everybody likes the idea of carrying plastic. Are we going to make sure people subsisting on root mush have ATM’s in their communities? No. We are going to raise taxes on our poor people to impose bankers’ ethnocentric concepts of culture on the ROW.
  • Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew wants to expand the rainbow of financial products to the excluded. Yes. Let the poor invest in derivatives with a hidden variable that suddenly blows up to infinity. That beats food and shelter any day.
  • Following the recession, people need help saving for their retirement. Yes. Big government’s Social Security program flopped. So, rather than letting people who think they can even afford a savings account look for a more competent financial manager, government will force them to pay for its next intentionally failed business model.
  • Know what? You guys know the economy is doomed. You just want to obfuscate and push the drop-dead date into another administration.
  • In 2010, 26 million people didn’t have enough financial history to have a credit score. So what? I’m not using my credit score for anything.
  • Citizens are referred to as consumers, reminiscent of the phrase “useful eaters.”
  • Lew observed some banks were conflating “financial inclusion” with risky investment. Dood! If the national government had taken the advice of skilled bankers like my hero John Allison, we wouldn’t have had a housing crisis.
  • Lew said, “we know that financial exclusion undermines the integrity of the entire financial sector.” No, I don’t know that. Would you care to explain it to me at a second-grade level, clearly enough so I could draw a picture?