First draft written for my national radio commentary about this tonight, so the hard work is done. Great thread! Thanks all.

@lauren

The thing that no one thinks about is the loss of control over one's finances: what it's like for the poor and/or those who have income that varies, like tipped hospitality industry workers, or those who work in commission sales.

For those workers (a significant percentage in the Atlanta area) it can be a scramble to pay bills. You may not know how many of your bills you can pay on time, and you may have to cobble them from more than one source, like splitting a payment on two credit cards, or partially from the credit union, instead of 100% from your bank. Any automatic debit system is a nightmare for people who don't know how much money they are going to make, or what emergencies they may incur. If the money isn't there, paying by check would only net one late fee, but if the automatic debit causes you to be overdrawn, now you have a fee from the bank on top of the late fee assessed by the payee.

Our entire system has always favored those on a regular salary and the wealthy. Banks/Credit card companies don't make any money on the people who don't carry any debt. This would likely raise fees and extra debt burden on those who can least afford it.

@lauren Wow. Checks are negotiable instruments. Not sure how they would distinguish them from other negotiable instruments.

@lauren without checks, how are members of Congress going to commit check fraud by bouncing checks on purpose?

@lauren

Wow. I specifically use checks to limit surveillance and untrustworthy electronic access to my accounts.

I hate how everybody wants to have blanket permission to decide how much you owe and just rip the money out of your account, regardless of whether it might cause an overdraft and exorbitant fees on top of that.

With a check, I have to ritually authorized each payment, and that is how I like it.

Oh, and by the way, I don't give an F how other fascist countries like in the EU or UK or Oz are running their payment systems. I don't care if they no longer use checks, or have given up cash for full-time surveillance electronic payments and national identity cards -- I Just Don't Care -- and I don't think most Americans care what other countries are doing in these respects either. Those fascist countries can do what they want. What we're concerned about in this context is our OWN fascist country. Q.E.D.

@lauren cash only for us. They can’t track cash

@lauren this is a poverty issue. We underestimate how huge the issue of poverty is in the USA if we compare ourselves with other countries. The poverty is only going to get worse. Electronics cost.

@lauren What. The. Actual. Fuck. 😡

@lauren

wtf

@lauren

I live in a very rural area. Before I moved here I wrote very few checks, but out here in the boonies there are a lot of organizations which only accept checks. I guess that would kill what's left of our economy.

Also: If the volume of checks is decreasing, why do they have to improve infrastructure to handle this new, lower volume? Huh?

@lauren The IRS still pushes hard for paper checks in certain circumstances - for instance they really do not like electronic transfers for qualified charitable distributions (QCD) - Every November I have to print and sign a stack of paper QCD checks - with a fountain pen and green ink - no autopen is involved.

@lauren cold. dead. hands.

@lauren Does this mean, like for everyone? So would we have to pull out cash every month to pay our rent? Yeah that sounds super safe 🤦

@lauren Wow, need to make sure the credit card companies get their cut, I guess. 😡