The big takeaway I got is that it was a mistake to let corporations set up electronic money. The US government let a few corporations set up and conduct electronic money transactions, so not only do we as a society have to pay for our money, we have to do this article's type of kremlinology to understand data we should have open and free access to.
What's stopping the US govt from building a solution and competing for market share? If they can do it cheaper and better, it would gain adoption, but I suspect cheaper would just mean "offset by taxes".
It's obnoxious enough to have credit cards (/especially/ Visa and Mastercard) breathing down my neck about what and where I spend my money, I definitely don't want to make that even worse by having the government feast upon that data instead.
As near as I can tell, check clearing is fast and accurate and very rarely screws up. It's also adequately funded. The divisions of government, local state and federal, that are funded, do well. The ones that aren't funded adequately are awful. This is consistent with companies like CenturyLink that don't fund branches properly: those branches are terrible.
"Deduce" means to logically follow evidence. Semantically, there's no overlap, whatever etymology might say.
This is one of those problems where spell check is correct, but the word is used incorrectly.
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."