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The truth is, I never travel without cash. I always take a few tens with me in case of an emergency. There's never been an emergency, and in time, I realized that Americans don't want to touch customers' dirty bills. They also don't want to touch your credit card: you have to put it through the machine yourself, with your own fingers.

Small businesses have told us that having cash in their pocket is one of the primary things that they need.

You stick a credit card in a machine, and you pay $3 or whatever it is to get cash - your own money.

To jump-start our economy, we must leave cash in your hands - because if you've got money in your pocket, you'll spend it at the hardware store or the corner market, and that will drive job growth in our private sector.

Cash as a physical entity will virtually cease to exist, with coins and checkbooks consigned to museums. As people conduct their financial transactions on hand-held devices made secure by advanced biometrics, even tipping will be done electronically.

We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?

Money is a strange business. People who haven't got it aim it strongly. People who have are full of troubles.

Every time we spend a federal dollar, what we're doing is we're pulling money out of somebody's pocket, and we're giving it to somebody else.

Everyone can get a little sloppy with cash and it's smart to notice. But what's squeezing you is the big stuff you ladle onto your credit cards.