Yeah, fair enough, the idea makes some sense. But the fact that it’s an entire party trying to dismantle USPS, a party that has a lot of power, and not just one person, is precisely the very strong reason I wouldn’t be able to trust it or buy into a plan to add accounts and depository banking to the postal service. (I already get suspicious with articles that start by framing the USPS as an unprofitable business. They might indeed be “losing” money, but it’s a branch of our tax-funded government, and we don’t expect other branches to be profitable businesses. Does it even make sense to frame the police or FBI or firefighters as “unprofitable”? The narrative of the USPS deficit seems like part of the plan to privatize it...)
On top of that, I guess it’s very, very far from trivial to spin up such a service even though it’s true the USPS has a nationwide physical presence. It might be fair to say it’s easier than starting from scratch, maybe, but the USPS has entrenched practices and infrastructure that might not easily extend to physical and digital security required to handle high volume finances at all.
Does having electronic accounts cover everyone? We seem to have a rapidly growing homeless population in the US, and many homeless people have real difficulties holding on to cell phones & documents long term, anything that would allow them to authenticate and/or use an electronic account.
If electronic accounts were the solution, I could also imagine the primary infrastructure being a phone app (maybe not entirely dissimilar from China’s WeChat). In-person cash transactions for deposits and withdrawals could perhaps be mostly handled by ATMs?
