By Dan Ferris in the S&A Digest:

It seems any time the government sets out to help the poor, it winds up making a bunch more people poorer than when it started out. The mortgage crisis was born of the government's attempt to shove home ownership down the throats of people who couldn't afford to repay their mortgages.

Now, the FDIC is making the beginning rumblings of another help-the-poor boondoggle...

An FDIC study says roughly 17 million American adults don't have a bank account. The study labeled another 43 million adults as "underbanked," meaning they have a bank account but rely heavily on other financial services like check-cashing and money orders.

The FDIC thinks its job is to make these people use banks more often, even though they've told the FDIC they don't have enough money to justify all the fees and the risk of overdrafting. The FDIC thinks the way to get poor people to use banks is to regulate the banking industry even more...

In a conference call with reporters, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said, "Our challenge is to make sure banks have the appropriate range of products and services that meet the needs of all low-income communities and have the right fee mix that is cost-effective."

This sounds eerily like the platitudinous ramblings of people like Barney Frank, the senator from Massachusetts who thought it was a great idea for the government to guarantee mortgages for people who couldn't afford to repay them.

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