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Access To Financial Services In The 21st Century: Five Opportunities For The Bush Administration And The 107th Congress (Symposium On Poverty And The Law)., Michael S. Barr Jan 2002

Access To Financial Services In The 21st Century: Five Opportunities For The Bush Administration And The 107th Congress (Symposium On Poverty And The Law)., Michael S. Barr

Articles

Noticeably absent from debate over President Bush's agenda is any discussion of a central question for equality of opportunity in the 21st century. Access to financial services is the "passport" to our modem economy, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers oft said, but despite the enormous progress that has been made over the last decade, too many families in the United States still are left out of the financial services mainstream. There are five key opportunities that the Bush Administration, working with Congress and the private sector, can seize in order to continue to democratize access to financial services: …


Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr Jan 2002

Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr

Articles

The consequences of not having access to mainstream financial services can be severe. Fim, the "unbanked" face high costs for basic financial servies. For example, a 2000 Treasury [U.S. Treasury Department] study found that a worker eaming $12,000 a year would pay approximately $250 annually just to cash payroll checks at a check cashing outlet, in addition to fees for money orders, wire transfers, bill payments, and other common transactions. Regular payments with low credit risk that could be directly deposited into bank accounts, with significantly lower payment systems costs, form the bulk of checks cashed at these check cashing …


Poverty And Equality: A Distant Mirror, Gene R. Nichol Jan 2002

Poverty And Equality: A Distant Mirror, Gene R. Nichol

Michigan Law Review

In one sense, Joel Schwartz's new effort, Fighting Poverty with Virtue, is tremendously timely. Bill Clinton's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was designed to "end welfare as we know it," turning greater attention to poor people's habits than to their pocketbooks. George Bush's compassionate conservatism is meant to pick up the pace, overtly seeking "to save and change lives." The White House's ominously entitled "Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" is apparently set to unleash new waves of moral reformers. Schwartz's book seeks to provide moral, philosophical and historical sustenance for these initiatives. He focuses on …