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Four years after America’s “bigger is better” banking model collapsed under its own weight, there are signs of a shift towards more local, accountable, and borrower-friendly banking across the country.

In Maryland, a Lend Local bill under consideration would require the state to move more of its public deposits out of large out-of-state Wall Street banks into community banks, who lend more, per dollar of bank assets, to in-state businesses. As our colleague Jason Judd wrote in an op-ed published Monday in the Baltimore Sun:

Taken on a state by state basis, the losses incurred to the U.S. from the loss of out-of-state sales taxes are staggering.

Taken on a state by state basis, the losses incurred to the U.S. from the loss of out-of-state sales taxes are staggering.

How Citizens Union decision has given an even greater voice to the wealthy who do not always have the same priorities as the rest of America.

The opening sentence of "Reducing the Deficit by Increasing Individual Income Tax Rates", a paper [pdf] jointly authored by the Pew Charitable Trust and Tax Policy Center, is worth noting: "Current federal budget policies are unsustainable." (A month before publication, the US debt-to-GDP ratio broke 100 percent.)

Okay, let’s make this clear one more time. The way to lower gas prices is to stop oil speculation, ratchet down Iran war talk, and make real investments in alternative fuel supplies. And the way to be less negatively affected by price hikes is to decrease our oil-intensive and car-centric lifestyle so that we spend less time fretting at the gas pump. These are not catchy or easy fixes, but they are the only ones that will work.

The progressive policy world does a great job of spotlighting the economic hardships of low- and moderate-income Americans, but I've long noticed a big gap in all this work: An appreciation of how much the volatility in energy prices impacts these struggling households.

We should stop rewarding giants like Bank of America with our public deposits.

Corporations are not inherently bad, but they have strong incentives to behave badly to increase their profits and stock value. The free market, which tends to push companies to behave positively when it comes to innovation, price, and customer service, often offers few counter-weights to the strong incentives which exist to cut corners ethically and take huge risks.