Harriet Tubman Statue in Harlem, New York.
Harriet Tubman Statue in Harlem, New York. Stockelements/shutterstock.com

Yesterday, I stated that placing the real American hero Harriet "Moses" Tubman on the $20 bill was not a great idea because money is the root of so much evil—slavery, war, the destruction of the environment, and so on. Tubman was a liberator, a feminist, and a consistent Christian humanist. The same cannot be said about most of the white men on our cash. Let them be damned.

But there is another (and maybe more interesting) way of looking at this matter. In our society and times, the poor perform most of their commercial transactions with cash. The economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco put it this way:

The preference for cash declines sharply once household income exceeds $25,000 per year... These consumers typically have a higher number of monthly cash transactions with a ticket size valued at $25 or more than does any other household income group... [L]ow income consumers use cash much more frequently for bill payments like housing than the average consumer. This likely is due, at least in part, to a lack of access to banking and financial products... For example, as a study by the FDIC found, low income consumers use cash because they view most mainstream banking and financial products as too expensive or too difficult to obtain.
What does this mean? Here is my reading: Cash is to commerce what the ghetto is to the city. And in this sense, we can understand the logic of printing the image of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill ("the average value of a cash transaction is only $21, compared with $168 for checks and $44 for debit cards"); it is like naming an avenue in a black neighborhood (still the quintessential American ghetto) after the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr..

Because one in four black Americans live at or below the poverty threshold (around $25,000—the point at which cash transactions begin to increase), it makes sense to put a black American hero on money. A large portion of this group, the descendants of women like Tubman, lives in a financial ghetto that presents almost no access to low-interest credit and federally protected bank accounts.