There are four important votes coming before shareholders of banks and financial services firms during the upcoming annual meetings.

Calvert will ask shareholders of BB&T and Capitol One to evalute “overdraft policies and practices and the impacts these practices have on borrowers.”

Christian Brothers Investment Services will ask shareholders of Cash America, a large payday lender, to adopt a policy that ends payday lending.

The Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina is asking shareholders of JP Morgan Chase to “cease its current practice of issuing Refund Anticipation Loans.”

I am thrilled to see the socially responsible investment community acting to address these issues. This movement has been very active in pursuing important causes for environmental health and human rights.  There has been less attention to financial issues. That day has come. Perhaps this reflects how even the well-off have been hurt by the subprime lending crisis. My only lament is that there are not more than four ballot initiatives.

Cigarettes are slowly being taxed out of American way of life.  In some places it can cost more than $7 to buy a pack of cigarettes.  In New York, it can cost more than $9.  Federal and state taxes are increasing on cigarettes.  It’s so steep that people have largely abandoned the habit of sharing cigarettes in polite company.

Often, cigarette taxes are collected in the name of some kind of social good.  For example, in North Carolina, new taxes on cigarettes are going to pay medical costs.  A large share of those costs are actually income-targeted, too.  They go to pay state shares of Medicaid.

Lotteries, by the way, often have the same model.

Let’s look at payday lending.  It deserves some of the same treatment as cigarettes, undoubteldy.  Many might call payday lending a cancer on the communities where it is practiced.  Most of the public dialogue on what to do about payday lending focuses on either shutting it down, or on curbing its costs.

The latter aims often try to get the price of payday lending below some notion of usury.  In North Carolina, that price level is 36 percent.

In effect, legislation forces payday lenders to tone down the toxicity of their business model.  It is as if Monsanto agreed to create a roundup that only killed half your weeds.  It would be pretty certain that the weeds would come back, no?

What if — legislation required that payday lenders not be allowed to charge anything below an absolutely stratospheric price by enforcing high taxes on each payday loan transaction?  What if the cost of taking out $50 was attended by the fees for the payday lender, plus another $25 in fees for the state?  Or maybe another $50 in fees?

This might be a bust.  Conceivably, the desperation that attends the use of payday loans might not be extinguished by another round of levies.  If that was true, then the policy would merely transfer resources from the poorest individuals into state coffers.  That would be very unfortunate policy.

That said, it might force a new parsimony upon the industry.