This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 14th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Part of a financial reform offered up by Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio

Cortez includes so-called postal banking.

What is it?

What would it include?

Why does Cato's Todd Zawiki think it's a terrible idea?

We spoke this week.

The notion is that low-income people are relatively poorly served

by institutions that exist now, and they think that having the post office run some sort of,

I don't know if it's more than rudimentary banking services,

but they want the Postal Service to be involved

in providing banking services.

So what do you suspect that actually would look like?

Okay, let's say the whole proposal is pretty sketchy at this point and a few weeks ago you may have

seen Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez we'll just call her

AOC how's that sound? Put forth a proposal that would basically create a 15% cap on all interest rates on consumer

loans throughout the country and they basically admitted or boasted that one of the reasons was to get rid of payday lenders

and other non-traditional lenders and that sort of thing.

And then they basically said, and to replace them, now that we've taken that away we're going to have

the post office do some sort of banking. They provided no details in their

legislation. The legislation itself was only six pages long, but they don't say

...