This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 20th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

For those who want to go cashless, it's getting easier, but for the shrinking number of people who want to use cash for virtually all face-to-face transactions,

it's getting far more difficult.

Is it okay for the feds to help preserve your choice to use cash by banning cashless stores.

Congress is thinking about it.

Cato's Diego Zulawaga comments.

Some stores are going cashless.

These are retail establishments where you would otherwise be making a

might otherwise be making a purchase in cash but these are places that say look

everybody's got a phone these phones have chips in them that allow people to spend money with

us without pulling out a wallet, or allows us to not have a cash register exactly the money goes right into our

account why is that considered controversial well the argument is that's a specific segment of the population that

doesn't have bank accounts and doesn't have easy access to payment cards and

therefore policies that prevent them from paying in cash effectively mean they can no longer go to those establishments.

Now I happen to think that that argument is a bit of an exaggeration and it doesn't reflect reality because if you look at

surveys of the unbanked and underbanked in the United States it's only about

4% 4.5% of households that don't have a bank account and don't regularly use prepaid cards.

So the proportion of the population that's in this situation is already very small.

And I think the reason they don't use prepay cards which are widely

available is that they are still able to deal in cash so that actually not much of their

purchasing activity is affected by cashless policies on

on behalf of certain retail establishments.

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