There's a pitifully small opening balance requirement, and the most basic account is free (and has no interest). You don't have to keep the minimum in the bank.
It's the overdraft protection that's a killer. You pay for authorization to be overdrawn, and if you're overdrawn it's spendy--not payday-loan interest rates, but still more than you'd want to pay.
If you overdraw without protection, exceed the agreed-upon and paid-for overdraft protection amount or the number of days you can be overdrawn, your account's subject to being frozen and you may be blacklisted. Not just by the BP, but other banks. The BP doesn't receive government money. It's mostly self-financing, as it's set up, but it would require a lot of rethinking the US postal system.
Given the way things are in the US, I'd imagine a fair number of families below the poverty line would have rather large overdraft protection fees and tend to use the overdraft protection a lot. If interest on overdrafts is 14% and the fees are another few percent (even if the service isn't used) that can quickly start approaching payday-loan levels and that would suddenly become not much better than what we have in the US now.
If we dispose of the overdraft charges, then it's another government subsidy, with the government making what amounts to low-interest loans to the poor for indefinite time periods. I doubt such a topic would form part of the publicly managed debate on setting up something like the BP in the US. Now, we could have that discussion, but I'd also want to have a third point brought up, something that would almost certainly become an evergreen issue in election years: "Vote for me, and there'll be an past-due loan amnesty." The response would be, "It would never happen," but it would. Then it would become a big moral thing--do we forgive the loans and be good atheists/Xians or be nasty, mean-spirited conservatives? A fourth point would also have to be, "If you declare bankruptcy are federally-backed postal overdrafts included?"
Something else to keep in mind is that bank fees in France are larger than the bank fees here. My checking and savings accounts are free. I'd be paying $300+ for the same services in France. It's likely that in the US the postal bank would receive really stiff competition from private banks--the BP does in France with the high fees. BP does well because it handles the poor but also it handles small bergs that otherwise wouldn't have a bank. It's likely the US version would wind up with a very large overdraft balance very quickly, requiring either government subsidy or higher fees.
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