Can the U.S. Go ‘Cashless?’

COLD OPEN

KATHRYN: I haven’t slept all the way through the night in almost a year, and it’s like really starting to show.

ROBIN: Adding up.

KATHRYN: It’s adding, it’s adding up.

INTRO

KATHRYN: Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I’m economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

ROBIN: I am Editor Robin Rauzi.

KATHRYN: On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.

ROBIN: Today on Optimist Economy, we’re going to talk about who uses cash anymore and why, and what does that actually tell us.

KATHRYN: I am wondering how long I can wait until I say “Cash is king” or something like that. Cash is king. Okay. Whew. It’s gone.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

ROBIN: First of all, I saw this review on Apple Podcasts that says, “I’ve become a better dinner party/cocktail party guest since listening to this podcast,” which I think is a great endorsement. Also, maybe you go to different parties than I do. I don’t know.

KATHRYN: Or maybe nobody else thinks that but her, right? Like, she’s a great guest, or maybe everybody else is like, “Oh God, this is taking a turn. It’s that damn show again.”

ROBIN: Exactly. So thank you for that review. Also, a comment on Spotify: somebody shared a YouTube video where a tattoo artist was shown pictures of people’s tattoos, and she was supposed to try to match the person to the tattoo without knowing who had what. And one of the people had a tattoo of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index equation on her foot. And it turned out that she was the granddaughter of either Herfindahl or Hirschman — she didn’t say which, though the YouTube commenters put their money on Hirschman. Anyway, that’s a deep cut.

KATHRYN: Talk about the corners of the internet coming together.

ROBIN: Exactly. See, optimists. Small world after all. But there were multiple people commenting like, “Who would get the HHI tattooed on their foot?”

KATHRYN: I mean, we’ve talked about getting Pilcrow tattoos.

ROBIN: Exactly. I was like, this is clearly a sign.

KATHRYN: We’ve never clarified they would be matching Pilcrow tattoos right?

RETCON

ROBIN: Retcon. We got an email from Kathryn in Delaware who noticed that I could not say the word for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Apparently I said “semi-quintennial,” but it’s actually “semiquincentennial,” which is why I’m still going to just call it the 250th anniversary.

KATHRYN: Semiquincentennial. It’s such a bummer that it’s happening right now, right? But I mean, the Fourth of July is my favorite holiday. Like, bar none. I think it is the best holiday.

ROBIN: More than Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

KATHRYN: Thanksgiving’s your favorite holiday.

ROBIN: A lot of food.

KATHRYN: Oh, okay. Well, there’s a lot of food in my July 4th parties. A lot of food. Keep that in mind. Yeah. No, it’s truly like, like slaughtering the fatted calf. Our country is a year older. It’s like a birthday party but with no present. It’s summertime. You get to burn stuff because fireworks. It’s awesome.

TERMS & CONDITIONS

ROBIN: Okay. Terms and Conditions. Kathryn, did you look up anything this week?

KATHRYN: Uh, no.

ROBIN: You’re not really holding down the first half of this show.

KATHRYN: I know, it’s funny — we were off recording last week and now I’m just like, one week out of the groove and I’m like, who am I? Who are you? What is economy?

ROBIN: Do we, what, what optimist? I just looked up this thing that I read about called ChexSystems. So ChexSystems is like a credit bureau specifically for bank accounts. It’s a central database to verify all sorts of personal information related to your banking history. And I think this is where you can also get sort of blacklisted from opening a bank account. I didn’t realize that was separate from Equifax and TRW and the other credit reporting agencies.

KATHRYN: Yes. I mean, I think one term and condition for the show this week would be “unbanked.” It’s people who don’t have a bank account. But practically speaking, it means high use of alternative financial services and alternative financial products. So you don’t deposit cash in a bank, you don’t withdraw from a bank. You go to a check casher, you go to a pawnbroker, you go to a payday lender. These are not banks, but they perform financial services. And the only people who go to them are people who are somehow frozen out of the banking system. And being unbanked and using really not-great financial products tend to be synonymous, even though technically they’re two different things.

ROBIN: Did you say “frosted out” of the banking system?

KATHRYN: It’s a technical term? You got iced out by the banking system. Frosted out. I don’t know the words I say sometimes, believe it or not.

ROBIN: I think you mean frozen out.

KATHRYN: Frozen out. Yeah. That makes more sense.

ROBIN: We’ll be back in just a second for the Big Pilcrow discussion on cash and the unbanked.

BIG PILCROW

ROBIN: Are we ready to Pilcrow?

KATHRYN: “Pilcrow” is such a good motto — noun to verb. I am ready to Pilcrow.

ROBIN: Okay. So I was interested in this topic about our future cashless society, because a listener of the show wrote in to ask what the ramifications of a cashless society would be. And so I looked up where we are in cash usage, and I was sort of shocked, frankly, to find out that while cash usage had dropped during the pandemic — which is what everybody sort of thinks of — it in fact stabilized. About 80% of people still carry cash. And cash hoarding, like people keeping a lot of cash around the house, has gone up since the pandemic. Maybe it’s just people feel like they need more cash around the house. But still, polls show that people really do think that we’re headed toward a cashless society. Gallup did a poll on this in 2016, and again in 2022. 70% of people under 50 think it’s likely that we will be a cashless society in their lifetime. But this would be a problem. It’d be a problem for a lot of people.

KATHRYN: Yeah, because outwardly it sounds great, right? Like, cash is filthy. We have to pay money to print it.

ROBIN: Yeah. I drop cash a lot — I pull a phone out of my pocket and whatever cash was in there goes flying.

KATHRYN: Yeah. Well, now there’s truly no feeling like putting on a clean pair of pants and realizing you left money folded in your pocket and it’s been through the washer and dryer, and it’s now crisp and dry and you find it. Found money is free money even if it was your money the whole time, right? Like, that’s a joy I’d love other people to experience, even if it’s like a dollar. But then it’s also like, it’s easier to pay without cash. You don’t have to count it out, rifle through it, carry it. It feels safer. Businesses say that it’s safer for them. It seems like such a win, win, win, win, win. Like, what could possibly be wrong about not having cash when it is so convenient in so many ways and makes transactions simpler? I have a friend who often puts things through the Star Trek test.

ROBIN: Yeah. Do you use a lot of cash? I more or less stopped carrying cash during the pandemic.

KATHRYN: I, you know, my cash usage has gone up because I moved back to Houston and my mom lives 10 minutes away and she uses cash. So I’ll end up with these arrangements of like, I’ll order pizza, and she’s like, “Oh, well, let me give you money for the pizza.” And then she gives me cash and I’m like, what am I going to do with cash?

ROBIN: So you’re just getting like, allowance money from your mom still.

KATHRYN: Okay, no. She’s paying me back at a good rate.

ROBIN: That’s hilarious. I actually only get cash out of an ATM at the airport. I think when I travel, I feel like I should have cash, and then I often come back with all of it still in my bag. But I have also converted almost entirely to Apple Wallet payments, and apparently I’m part of the problem. Just no cash, no problem.

KATHRYN: Well, I find this to be a really interesting question. When you said you want to talk about cash, I was like, “Oh, let’s talk about cash,” because we’re not going to talk about cash. Actually, we’re going to talk about banking, financial products, and financial services. I don’t think there is any harm in the world if you decide you’re never going to use cash again. I think the problem is people for whom that doesn’t work and why it doesn’t work. And this is one of these really interesting cases in which you embracing something has no bearing on whether or not it’s a good policy overall. Not having cash would hurt a lot of people in the economy — not you — but your worlds can co-exist, where you never have to use cash again and that doesn’t mean they have to stop using it. Which is why a lot of states have had bans on cashless businesses.

ROBIN: What is it? Nine? I looked it up. Nine states and the District of Columbia have statewide cashless business bans.

KATHRYN: Yeah, businesses are not allowed to go cashless.

ROBIN: I was just at Dodger Stadium on Friday — cashless. They sent an email in advance of the game saying we do not accept cash. I was like, baseball doesn’t accept cash? And actually, who knows if anything’s ever going to move forward in Congress ever again, but the Payment Choice Act of 2025, which has 21 bipartisan co-sponsors, would insist that businesses with a brick-and-mortar retail location take cash for purchases up to $500. And there are some weird exceptions, like you can have a machine that lets them put cash on a card that they can pay with.

KATHRYN: Oh, like an arcade.

ROBIN: Exactly. Like a one-time gift card machine. I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. But it’s interesting because I think you see both sides of this. One side is the concern for people who are unbanked, but then also I think there’s a real concern around privacy — there are people who legitimately don’t want their every purchase tracked by financial institutions and credit institutions.

KATHRYN: Or the government.

ROBIN: Or the government. Right.

KATHRYN: So I think there’s one aspect of this that’s just purely: do you have the right in our economy to choose how you pay for things? And what is the mechanism for turning one of those options off? And it’s not so much an endorsement that cash is better, but that choice and agency amongst consumers is better. And this lends itself to a lot of bipartisan support of like, do not let the banking lobby convince you that we shouldn’t be allowed to use cash anymore. That makes me feel like it has such a long tail — because if you don’t like banks and you don’t like the government, should you be forced to go through a financial institution to be a participant in our economy?

ROBIN: Yeah. I mean, no.

KATHRYN: No, I mean, yeah, exactly. Like, I never want to use cash again, but do not tell someone that they have to go through a bank. It’s a fundamental question of how we allow people to participate in the economy. And that fundamental question is met with a lot of evidence that the people who would then gatekeep participation in our economy — they’re not good. Their track record would be not good. I mean, I want to say mixed, but I’m not going to, because it ain’t. It’s a bad track record. Financial services that go to especially low-income people are bad.

ROBIN: Wait, you’re saying big banks, not necessarily the alternative financial services that you were talking about earlier.

KATHRYN: Well, it’s cascading issues. You need to be able to convert your currency into some type of payment system. How do you do that? Well, most of us go to a bank, but what if the bank says we won’t take you? According to the Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making, which is put out by the Federal Reserve, 6% of adults are unbanked. And that number’s been pretty steady — relatively stable over the last 10 years or so.

ROBIN: And it’s a pretty high correlation of being on the blacklist from banking institutions — these are people who’ve had too many overdrafts, didn’t pay off accounts that had balances owed because of things like overdraft fees. And they’re kicked out of the banking system for a period of time.

KATHRYN: The cousin of unbanked is called underbanked. A separate survey is put out by the FDIC, which is the Survey of the Unbanked and Underbanked Households. They measure in terms of households, and it’s 4.2% of households. The underbanked rate is 14.2%, so underbanked — meaning you have a bank account but use alternative financial products and services — is roughly three times the unbanked.

ROBIN: Wow. And it’s not surprising, but if your family income is under $25,000 a year, the rate of being completely unbanked is 22%. And if your household makes under basically $50,000 a year, the unbanked rate is still at 8%.

KATHRYN: That’s problem one. They don’t hit everybody. Problem two is — how do I say this — banks are racist. They don’t mean to be racist, they’re regulated not to be racist, but they 100% are.

ROBIN: But how do we know that they’re racist? I mean, especially in this day and age where you can open a bank account and never talk to a human, never step foot in a bank.

KATHRYN: One way that we see it is the difference in outcomes in terms of what kind of credit you’re offered — your credit approval rate, your credit denial rate, your total access to credit — of Black and white people who have very similar incomes. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making, the SHED, measures things like: have you ever applied for a credit increase and been denied? And if you look within income bands, you’re still looking at Black households pulling down north of $100,000 whose denial rate will be much higher than white households even. So these are high-income people being rejected from credit applications. And that disparity exists even among high-income households — so among low-income households it’s going to be worse. And that’s also true with Latino households, right?

ROBIN: Yes, although the biggest knock in the financial sector is being a Black person.

KATHRYN: So here’s a case study that’s illustrative. It’s 2020 and Congress has passed the Paycheck Protection Program, which is intended to open up credit to small businesses — basically a fire hydrant pouring water into the street — to keep them from going under as the economy comes to a screeching halt. The PPP works through existing lending institutions. You do not go to the government for money. You go to a bank, and the bank opens up a small loan for you backed through the PPP. It went to big banks, it went to small banks.

KATHRYN: A research and advocacy group called the National Community Reinvestment Coalition did a paired test of the PPP loan. A paired test means you have two people — one Black, one white, one in a protected class, one not — and it was originally developed by HUD. It was called the Slam Door Test, where they would send people out into neighborhoods to respond to for-lease signs and see what was the slam-door rate — the white person being given access to the apartment versus the Black person having the door slammed in their face. This model has become much more sophisticated over time, but the fundamental question they’re testing is the same: when two people come to you looking for a service, do you treat them differently based on their race, skin color, sexual preference, gender, or pregnancy status?

KATHRYN: So the National Community Reinvestment Coalition had a set of people at the start of the pandemic call banks. They were supposed to be small business owners. They were given a script: here’s the size of your business, here’s how much money you need, here’s how many people you have on staff. They had half men, half women, half Black, half white. And as they point out in the report, most Americans are able to identify based on someone’s voice whether they’re Black or white. So you have Black-sounding people calling a bank, and then you have white-sounding people calling a bank. And they were given wildly different advice, even though they were given the prompt of the exact same business — the exact same numbers and statistics. A Black man calls and they give him worse advice, even though the money isn’t even coming from the bank. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition had done this type of testing leading up to the pandemic, so they were ready to go. They spun this research up really quickly and sent it out the door. And yeah, if you were a small business owner with a Black voice in 2020, banks were more likely to offer you smaller loans, tell you to do things like take out a home equity line of credit instead of a business loan. I mean, they just got worse advice.

ROBIN: Oh my God.

KATHRYN: Yeah. Criminally bad advice in some cases. And this isn’t a problem that exists only in April of 2020. It exists up and down financial institutions throughout. So some of the badness of financial services comes from bad products — we don’t need to explain to listeners why payday loans are predatory. There are bad products, but then there is bad treatment of people within good products. So it’s a compounding problem. You don’t serve everyone, you push them toward bad products, those bad products can be exploitative, and then even within good products, you still have disparate outcomes for people based on non-financial features — their skin, their race, their accents.

ROBIN: You know, we want to move into a cashless society. Like, who does that give power to?

KATHRYN: Wells Fargo.

ROBIN: Bank of America.

KATHRYN: Yeah.

ROBIN: I mean, in defense of big banks — words I never thought I’d say aloud — should they be forced to do business with customers who don’t have regular money to keep in an account, or who have a history of bouncing checks? I think if any of us owned a bank, we might be like, well, I don’t think I trust this person because they have a bad history of using credit.

KATHRYN: No, I actually don’t think banks should have to serve everybody. A for-profit private bank does not necessarily need to serve everybody, because they’ve proven themselves to be pretty — what is the word I’m looking for? Mean might be the right word. Opportunistic. But, like, why do you need to be charged a $35 fee for going 50 cents into the red in your bank account? It’s not necessarily that we should require them to serve those people, because they’ve kind of shown that they will make money off of people’s decision-making, good and bad. And I had a friend who worked for a bank regulator during the Biden administration’s push to get rid of junk fees. And the banks really took issue with their fees being called junk, because they were like, look, we’re not charging you $15 to buy an online ticket. These people owe us money. We should be allowed to charge them for that. It’s not a junk fee because it’s actually associated with a particular action that has a cost. Now does it cost $35? I don’t know.

ROBIN: And then you charge them over and over and over and over too.

KATHRYN: Should I tell my banking story? I have there are like banks that I will walk by and —

ROBIN: Like you won’t even withdraw money from their ATM.

KATHRYN: Oh my God. Like I will piss on their grave. I hate certain banks so much. Okay. So when I was spending a summer in D.C. at a paid internship, I deposited my paycheck on a Thursday or Friday of a holiday weekend. It was July 4th — obviously the best day of the year, the best weekend of the year. This is my first July 4th in D.C. We’re going to see fireworks. There’s all kinds of fun stuff going on. It’s like America. The weekend, I deposit my paycheck, and then the weekend starts. The paycheck’s not a lot, but not nothing. I’m proud of myself — I think I deposit something like $500. And when I check my balance at the start of the next week when the holiday is over, I owe the bank $700, $600, something wild. I was like, wait, is that negative? Because at first I was like, I only put in like $500. How did that swing?

KATHRYN: What had happened was they reordered transactions. So in my timeline — the human timeline that a person goes through — I deposited the money into the bank with a paycheck. I walked inside a bank to do this. Got my little receipt. Then over the next three days, purchased things. We went to museums, you know, whatever. I bought small stuff — $2 here, $3 here, $10 here, a movie ticket. When they actually processed all the transactions, they reordered it so that all of the transactions I had made before the weekend came first, and each incurred a $35 overdraft. And then the paycheck was the last thing deposited. So even though I deposited the paycheck, spent money over three days, and came back on a Tuesday, they reordered the transactions so as to force me to go into overdraft.

ROBIN: And not only that, it’s not like you went into overdraft and they charged you $35 once. They charged you $35 for the movie tickets, $35 for the beer and fries, $35 for the parking, or whatever.

KATHRYN: Hundreds of dollars. This is over a holiday weekend. I probably easily made 20 different transactions over a three-day holiday weekend. So I went back to the bank and I was like, what on earth — did y’all lose the little piece of paper that said I have money? And they’re like, no, that’s not us. Our branch can’t do anything. So I had to call the 1-800 number. This was like a day off of work — probably an hour for the phone call and seven hours just to pace in furious anger. And they were like, you know what, we are going to give you our special one-time exception and clear all of these and reorder the transactions. And I was like, reorder. I was so mad. They got off the phone and I went down to the bank and I was like, give me every dollar in that account. I was unbanked for the rest of the summer and I operated entirely off of cash because I hate banks. I hate the way they treat people.

KATHRYN: That’s not my only horrible bank story. That was in 2005. I had a similar problem — I moved abroad after I graduated college. So I closed my primary checking account before I moved. I moved to Russia, then to Prague. I closed the account, emptied it, and moved. Nine months later, my dad calls me and says, “What did you do? You have a third-party collection for over a thousand dollars.” It turns out that the account I had closed — like two days later, a charge hit, because they reorder and pause transactions. A charge came in after I closed it. I left the country. Then they charged me the overdraft, then charged me interest on the overdraft, and then compounded the interest. And then months go by.

ROBIN: Because why would you know? You closed the account and moved out of the country.

KATHRYN: Because I’m gone. I’m out of the country. I closed the account. I told my dad, “Oh yeah, throw that away. I don’t bank there anymore. They’re just trying to sell me something.” So it’s like month 10 of me living abroad — I’m a big girl living my independent self — and my parents have to go to the bank on my behalf to settle the debt. And my dad has been banking at this place for decades. It’s a small local bank. And he was like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” And they were like, well, we’re willing to settle for the initial overdraft. You just have to pay that and we’ll waive everything else and take the debt out of collection. Guess how much the overdraft was?

ROBIN: $35. How much?

KATHRYN: It was a dollar ninety-five.

ROBIN: What?

KATHRYN: Yeah. And it was me buying a Dr. Pepper that hadn’t cleared. My Dr. Pepper hadn’t cleared, and it was like a thousand-dollar Dr. Pepper. I’m still mad. Honestly, it’s been 20 years, I’m like, red and ugh.

ROBIN: I’ve been there. I mean, I think I told you about the time that I was trying to get a security deposit on my apartment, and I had my first paycheck and I deposited it, and they said, oh, well, this is a new account, we’re going to hold onto this for 10 business days. And I think I found this out because something had already bounced. And I went into the bank and they said, you know, this is a new account, we don’t just trust you. And I was like, this was a paycheck. If I walked up to this window and asked you to cash it, you would give me dollar bills. And if I walked around the room and got back in the line and handed you a big pile of dollar bills, you would put those into my account and you wouldn’t hold it for 10 days. Right? And they just said, well, yeah. And I said, okay, you can close that account right now and just give me all the cash in dollar bills. Thank you very much. And I never went back to that bank.

KATHRYN: Yeah. Oh, I think everybody has these types of experiences of — like, maybe I didn’t understand the game we were playing. I thought I was just giving you money and you were holding onto it, and then I was going out and spending in society. But actually I’m like some kind of mark and you’ve figured out a way to make money off of me by holding my money. It’s not just interest rates. Banking should be boring. You hold at 1%, you lend at another percent, but the fee apparatus, the restructuring of the transaction apparatus — they make money off of you.

ROBIN: Did you read that report from the Cleveland Fed where they did a focus group of people who were, half of them had banks and half of them were unbanked or underbanked? The hatred that some people had for banks — they didn’t trust them, they didn’t trust their privacy, they were poorly treated by them. For a lot of people, banks represent safety and security, and for people who have been mistreated by banks, it is 180 degrees the opposite. And that’s also where I really read about the privacy concerns that people have — they just don’t want the banks and the government up in their business about what they’re spending their money on.

KATHRYN: Oh yeah. If a bank has an AI chatbot, do you think it’s really good at keeping people’s private transactions to itself? I doubt it. I mean, I have a friend who thinks that the overdraft fees were such an effective long game of basically moving all of us consumers onto credit cards. I mean, there’s lots of things — we have more credit card options — but why would you incur debt for literally every transaction you have, unless it was just easier to manage? Because you just pay it off at the end of the month. And they can’t reorder transactions on a credit card the way they can on a debit card. So you’ve kind of locked people into preferring to use credit cards, which are more lucrative to the bank because they can charge them like $100 to $200 for each account.

ROBIN: Yeah, and of course they make more money on credit card transactions because they charge the business anywhere from 3 to 4% just to process that transaction.

KATHRYN: I mean, I imagine a lot of listeners would be in a position like myself where, I don’t like banks, but this is the world we live in and I’m rich enough to keep myself mostly protected from the type of practices that can leave you stung by the banking industry.

ROBIN: The other thing that I find galling is to be charged to have a bank account. And maybe I shouldn’t find that galling, but I do. Average monthly fees for banks that charge for checking accounts are now over $12 a month, which just seems like a lot. And of course there are banks that have no fees, or have no fees with minimum deposits, but a lot of those are online-only banks — and the people who need zero-fee banks are probably not the ones doing only online banking.

KATHRYN: So those fees aren’t nothing, but they can be prohibitive to someone who’s trying to open an account or at least a turnoff. Like, I’m supposed to open up a bank account so I can put my $100 somewhere safe, but they’re going to charge me $12 to hold my $100. You know, $144 a year isn’t much if you’re putting $100,000 into an account. But if you’re putting $500 into an account, that is a very high fee.

KATHRYN: Oh, I have a term and condition.

ROBIN: Okay. Ex post facto term and condition.

KATHRYN: Ex post facto term and condition is usury. Usury is the charging of incredibly high interest rates. And the reason why we don’t get charged incredibly high interest rates is that most state governments have usury regulations. And this is what has been used to try to eradicate payday lenders — to say that it’s a usury charge and their effective interest rates are unconscionable.

KATHRYN: So our question here about, will we go cashless — the problem with it is that you are very much at the mercy of financial institutions. And even those institutions that are good still have a lot of bad things that they do. It’s one of those: I would feel differently about a world in which financial institutions have a lot of power if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also had a lot of power. But I think the optimist solution here is that there is so much skepticism on both sides of the aisle about the power given to financial institutions in a cashless society that there is an opportunity for good policy.

ROBIN: Hmm.

KATHRYN: I mean, you asked me: should private enterprises have to maintain a bank account for everyone? And I think the answer is no. But your government should. We can offer financial services publicly. And we actually did for like 50 years through the postal system.

ROBIN: The U.S. Postal Savings System was a banking system set up through the post office where you could use the post office to make small deposits. It was set up in response to the Panic of 1907.

KATHRYN: The original strength of postal banking was that the FDIC didn’t exist yet. And if you put money into a postal bank account, it was backed by the federal government, whereas other banks were not. So this was a way to have small savers protected in the banking system through the post office. After the Great Depression, when the FDIC starts to ensure deposits even at private banking institutions in exchange for heavily regulating them, the nature of postal banking changes and it becomes like a small-dollar depository. So after that, it gets a little murky. There’s some evidence that wealthy people figured out they could get a low interest rate from it and were using it to park money. But they were really just doing short-term saving — it was just a place to put your money.

ROBIN: And they were giving out loans?

KATHRYN: No, I don’t think so. They were really just short-term saving. A lot of countries — probably the three that would strike the most comparisons for U.S. Western industrialized listeners — France, Germany, and Japan all have postal banking. And it is not a cure-all, but it is a way that people who either don’t want to use banks or don’t have access to banks can hold small-dollar deposits and cash checks. And there is a real push that has waxed and waned over the past 25 years to bring back postal banking. The postal workers union is very much in favor of it.

ROBIN: Yeah. I think this was last proposed in 2022. We’ll see if that ever gets revived again. But there is a feeling that it could, in fact, shore up the postal service financially by expanding their services.

KATHRYN: Yes. By expanding their services. I mean, I’m trying to imagine — I am not boxed out of financial services. So if they had a postal banking system, would I need it or use it? And of course I’m thinking it would probably be a great place to park some money for kids, like a way to teach them about bank accounts, with an institution that I feel safe with and I don’t have to worry that if I create a bank account but don’t touch it because I’m intending it for children over the long term, I’ll actually lose it all to fees.

KATHRYN: I just don’t like banks. It’s not that I don’t see their purpose. It’s not that I think they’re all bad or they only do bad things. I think they do amazing things, but they absolutely go after fees and exploitation when they have to. It’s like I fly in an airplane — it’s not because I love airlines, it’s because I would like to get across the country. I don’t fly because I love airlines. I don’t put my money in a bank account because I love banks. They do not want the alternative.

KATHRYN: We’ve talked before about the child savings accounts, the retirement accounts that everyone would have access to —

ROBIN: The Trump accounts.

KATHRYN: The Trump accounts in 2026. But also called child savings accounts and also called the auto-IRA or the Thrift Savings Plan. The whole point of those accounts is that not everyone is served by a private-sector, for-profit good. So you need to come up with an alternative. The alternative is a public provision.

ROBIN: Right. We need something that is the public provision.

KATHRYN: Yes.

ROBIN: I think there’s part of me that is just like, we should always have cash around because if nothing else, it serves as a check on how much power banks can really have, because we have a way of interacting with an economy that doesn’t involve them.

KATHRYN: And there’s something nice about that. I know that’s not necessarily the best policy solution. The best policy solution is that we will have alternative banking services that come into public areas and have better access to low-income communities, so that we don’t have to be quite so held over a barrel by the banking system. That’s the better option. But that is like the ultimate $20 bill you find when you take your pants out of the dryer. The ultimate 20 is to continue to have cash. But I’m not married to this one. I think if there were a good enough slate of financial services and products in which the interaction that most low-income people have is not like pure exploitation and usury, I think I would be okay with getting rid of cash.

KATHRYN: Well, for those of you who would like to contribute to Optimist Economy, we do not take cash. We do take check, but obviously our preferred method is a burlap sack full of gold coins with a dollar sign on the side of the sack. That is the currency we prefer here on the show.

ROBIN: You can’t mail us like a $10 bill in an envelope like my grandmother did at Christmas time. You can’t do that to us.

KATHRYN: I think you can mail us a $10. You can mail us cash.

ROBIN: Optimists, you can mail us cash. We’ll figure it out.

KATHRYN: Yeah. You know what, if you gave us cash, I would figure it out. Optimist Economy is not cashless.

ROBIN: Okay, good. I’m glad we’re on the record there. Okay. We’ll be back in a second for Executive Orders and Spiritual Sponsors.

EXECUTIVE ORDERS

ROBIN: Are you ready, Kathryn? So Executive Orders — what do you got?

KATHRYN: My executive order for the week is that youth sports need to be regulated so that their schedules ain’t so crazy. Because their schedules are crazy. And I think we need to have some pretty clear limitations on — we can call it a health and safety measure, but you can only practice and play games so many times per week per sport.

ROBIN: Mm-hmm. Friends who had multiple kids in multiple sports — I don’t know how they did it.

KATHRYN: It’s a lot for just the logistics of getting kids from place to place. But then I’ve talked to a lot of older parents who said that it really does end up that even if your kid loves sports, they can really only play one because the competition for time gets so intense. I also think that travel sports — and this is another health-and-safety ban — you cannot have travel sports until like age 14 or 15, something like that. And this would of course help parents feel more sane, but at the same time would be a lot less classism in the youth sports world, because it is incredibly expensive to do all of those things. And it’s wild if you have more than one kid who wants to play more than one sport — you’re down thousands of dollars. It makes being competitive at sports a privilege of the elite. So it’s not just because I don’t want to drive places or do things on weekends. It’s also for America. Youth sports need to be 50 to 70% less intense.

ROBIN: I endorse this. Speaking of junk fees, I think airline luggage fees should be done by weight, not by item. Like if I have two 10-pound bags, why should that cost me twice as much as one person who comes in with a 20-pound bag? They have a scale. You drop your stuff off, they weigh it right there. This is, to me, a common-sense reform that the American people will embrace.

KATHRYN: In addition to having a bathroom of a decent size, I would like to be charged in a sensible way for what I am doing. A hundred percent.

SPIRITUAL SPONSORS

ROBIN: Okay. Spiritual Sponsors — things that get us through our week.

KATHRYN: My spiritual sponsor is a little bit of a throwback now, but watching the Artemis crew splash down in the water with my kids around me, the yelps of joy when they saw the splash — it was just pure joy and excitement. And I’m like, well, we’re just hanging out on a Friday night watching the frontier of human achievement. Mom is sobbing.

ROBIN: Of course.

KATHRYN: I’m just absolutely sobbing.

ROBIN: Olympics of space.

KATHRYN: It’s just the Olympics. Space Olympics. Human achievement really moves me. And I’m sitting there sobbing and my kids turned around and one of them said, “Wait, is everything okay?” And I was like, yeah, everything’s great. Mom’s just really moved. So the Artemis crew touching down, and then the lovely hangover of like the hour it took for them to get the front porch out. My 5-year-old and 3-year-old were like, “Where’s the front porch? Should have deployed by now.” They just got it.

ROBIN: Was it actually called a front porch?

KATHRYN: Called the front porch. And then I came home, and my 6-year-old was coloring and he was making a front porch for a capsule. This is like the bane of people who have cats or children — cardboard boxes never really go away. I now have cardboard front porches.

ROBIN: Oh, good, good, good, good. My spiritual sponsor this week is a throwback to our friends with trucks, friends with pools, friends with season tickets. Friends with season tickets to the Dodgers.

KATHRYN: Oh, the Dodgers. Oh no, Robin.

ROBIN: Even the Dodgers. Even the cashless Dodgers. Yeah, I went to the game on Friday. It was really fun. Dodger Stadium is just a great place to see a baseball game. It was beautiful. Friends with season tickets.

KATHRYN: That’s awesome. Friends with season tickets, we thank you.

ROBIN: Yes. Thank you.

Optimist Economy is a nonprofit, but that doesn’t make the show free to produce. It does mean we can take contributions from your donor-advised fund if you have one, and we’ll also just take cash in an envelope. Send it our way.

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The Optimist Economy Podcast is edited by Sofi LaLonde. Video production for social media is by Andy Robinson. Video clips from the show for you to share are available on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and you can buy a T-shirt, a hat, or a tote bag on our website, optimisteconomy.com. And we’re also on Facebook.