Your guide to Measure LA on the 2022 California midterm ballot
Measure L makes California the country’s first cashless society
Here’s California’s plan to become the first cashless society in the United States.
If the Legislature passes House Bill 2018 on May 9, California will become the first cashless society in America, where citizens will no longer be able to make, receive, or use money except for the purchase of legally recorded legal transactions, like buying alcohol.
The law goes into effect on September 1.
It’s a bold and complicated plan by state legislators, who have struggled for years to put together a cashless society. The only way they’ve settled on is to stop the use of cash completely, by replacing it with chip-based payment.
And the state is ready to go. It’s already working on its cashless registry, which should be complete by 2021.
On Friday, we’ll introduce you to one of those cashless registries. It would be the world’s first, if the Legislature gives it the green light.
And we’ve put together what we expect to be a helpful guide to the new law, which lays out what you need to know about it.
How it works
Cashless registries have multiple uses.
For example, they eliminate the need to carry cash across borders; in the Philippines, for instance, the government only offers the U.S. a Visa debit card. A cashless registry would eliminate that need completely. The state could track citizens’ purchases online, using a chip-embedded credit or debit card like those issued by Visa, MasterCard or American Express—essentially replacing paper records with computerized ones.
“If you walk into a store and you want to buy something, you’re a cashier today,” says Bill Wexler, senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is also the chairman of the Board of Directors of