This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

So the Utah Legislature has taken another stab at shaving off some of the worst aspects of the rancid payday loan business. (You can't call it an industry. Industries create things.)

Both sides of the Capitol have approved, by properly overwhelming margins, House Bill 292. That's Rep. Brad Daw's latest effort at limiting the damage done by those weeds of the financial sector, businesses that thrive on the misfortune of others by charging crippling interest rates and trapping those with no other clear options into spirals of debt.

Daw, who has been an admirable thorn in the payday lenders' sides for a long time, says the bill is a compromise worked out with the businesses themselves.

Fair enough. The lenders deserve a chance to clean up their act before the nation moves to sweep the whole sorry lot of them aside.

A ready alternative is up and running. It has offices in many neighborhoods and towns abandoned by commercial banks. (Though not as many as the payday lenders do.) It has experience handling money but no need to make a profit. At least, not a 400 percent profit.

It's called the United States Postal Service.

The Post Office actually operated a sort of bank, the Postal Savings System, from 1911 to 1967. It only took deposits, on which it paid small rates of interest. It didn't make loans.

The idea of adding small-scale banking services to the Post Office's portfolio is supported by such proletarians as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The agency's own inspector general likes the idea, though upper management has shied away from it.

Small postal loans would probably not have the immediate turn-around offered by payday lenders. And the interest rates the system would have to charge to be self-supporting would likely be higher than those charged by regular banks, though a fraction of what the payday lenders get.

Daw's bill, which Gov. Gary Herbert should sign, is less about limits than about transparency.

It would require borrowers to be notified of their options, including a chance at interest-free extensions that might prevent them from taking out larger and larger loans to pay off previous notes. And it would require lenders to check, and contribute to, a database of borrowers, report on how many of them default and how much, if anything, they repaid before any collection actions were filed.

That data is necessary to check out the lenders' claims that they aren't as bad, or as quick to sue, as their critics say they are. It's information lawmakers could use in a year or two to draft even better regulations.

Or to decide that it's not worth the bother and let Benjamin Franklin's old operation fill the gap.