One of the great things about any political race is that the promises start coming out, and some of these sound on the surface downright ludicrous.
Trump’s plan to bill Mexico for a wall it didn’t build, Jeb’s push to get Americans to work more hours, and a host of others like it. One of the most recent came from Bernie Sanders, and it’s targeted a very mobile payment source: the ATM.
Under Sanders, automated teller machine (ATM) fees would be capped at $2, seemingly regardless of bank, transaction, location, or any other factor that could be used to distinguish any one ATM from another. Sanders noted that it was “unacceptable” that Americans would be required to pay fees from $4 to $5 dollars just for the sake of accessing their own money.
This was a point Hillary Clinton rang a note of assent on, noting that the fees were indeed too high and amounted to a form of “usury.”
Of course, many users could avoid such fees outright by simply doing business with their own bank’s ATMs, or simply doing business with another bank.
While Sanders and even Clinton aren’t necessarily out of line about the high nature of fees at ATMs, there are so many ways to avoid these fees that they really aren’t the kind of problem that government muscle should be trained upon. If we start requiring banks to charge certain fees, where does it end?
Do we require food stores to charge certain prices for cereal? Gas stations for gas? How long before these price ceilings run firms out of the market rather than be forced to operate a certain way?
How will we monitor these ATMs for compliance; will we need a massive federal hiring binge for new ATM fee inspectors? Will that ultimately cost us more than the fees ever did? There are a lot of unanswered questions in the midst of Sanders’ fee ceiling promise, and these unanswered questions may ultimately torpedo the entire project.
Sanders may be going for a populist push here, but his promises about ATMs may be not only more than he can follow through on, but more than the market itself can bear.
