Pay Cash

In 2005 and 2006 Debby and I worked at a large university in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, a densely populated, semi-tropical region  at the far southern end of the state. The RGV, as it is called, is separated from the rest of Texas  by large expanses of fairly empty country. The main cities in the valley are over two hundred miles south of San Antonio, a city many  people think of  as  being in “south Texas”, and over a hundred miles from Corpus Christi or Laredo.  It is officially a poverty stricken area, and there are some very poor people there as in most places, but it is not the  poor place the official statistics would have one believe. There is a whole lot of commerce going on there on a cash basis, unreported to and unmeasured by the government. Some of it is in the illegal drug trade along the border of course, but a good deal of it is in honest, ordinary, mutually beneficial transactions between  individuals who prefer to do their business in cash and away from the eyes of the government.The RGV is an extreme example, but the same thing goes on most places in the country. It is called the cash economy. It is probably more prevalent in rural and inner city areas than in suburbs, but you can see it all over.

I think people should pay cash  when they can.  They should do it out of benevolence toward their fellow citizens, concern for their own privacy, and  in the general interest of keeping the government from getting even bigger and more intrusive. (The argument that the captive taxpayers pay more taxes because some of those in the cash economy pay less than the government wants is specious. If the politicians ever did get their hands on the money “owed” on activities in the off the books portion of the cash economy, they probably would spend it, not grant anyone a tax cut.)  

Besides, paying with cash is just good business. A generation or so ago, people did it all the time.  A person can’t overspend the cash in his billfold, and no one will charge him interest or fees on the purchases he makes with it. It is sometimes possible to get a discount on purchases by paying in cash.  Cash is fully anonymous, and using it allows a person to keep at least a part of his private personal business private.  (There are already some legal items such as ammunition  which probably should be bought only with cash. If recent trends were to continue, the list of those things would get longer.)

Debby and I are making it a habit to use cash instead of checks or cards for most of our transactions with local small businesses and independent operations. At a minimum that saves them the percentage they would have had to pay the credit card company. I urge others to do the same and pay the babysitter, the kid who mows the lawn, the repairman, the local restaurant,  or the woman in the antique shop in cash. It’s easy, once you get used to it.