Cash is king on wobbly throne
Do you have to be rich to go cashless?
The answer is no, but it helps.
The proportion of Americans who don’t use cash to make purchases during a given week has risen to 29 percent.
That is up from 24 percent in 2015.
A helpful Daily Mail story laid out all the particulars.
Now about that rich question.
Fully 41 percent of Americans with incomes above $75,000 a year don’t use cash.
For the poor, who are often shut out of the banking system, 29 percent use cash for all or mostly all purchases.
Most coin collectors are sitting between these two extremes.
Some of their purchases are made with cash. Others are not.
The statistics in the story put half of all Americans in the same situation.
But like a sick man who takes his pulse every five minutes, we coin collectors are fascinated by evidence of movement toward a cashless society.
It might happen. It might not. We don’t know.
But we do know what we fear.
The source of the information for this news story says we will never go completely cashless.
There, now.
We can all relax and assume that the U.S. Mint will continue to pump out billions of shiny new coins year in and year out for the rest of our lives.
When the 100th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is celebrated in 2069, we can rest easy that there will be coins to mark the occasion.
The denominations might have changed to 100 million dollars, but there will be coins.
Buzz blogger Dave Harper won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog for the third time in 2017. He is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."
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