King Francis: Our Currency

I’m on vacation this week, taking the little Curmudgeons to Disney World. So I am lightening the blog load by posting some somewhat off-topic items that I wrote in advance. Since I may literally be in Fantasyland when you read this, I am taking as my theme one of my favorite fantasies, that I am King of America and can rearrange things as I see fit. Today, the topic is our paper money and coins.

I hereby decree that soon as possible, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will revert to the paper money designs in use in 1990. The current designs are embarrassing and lack gravitas. How can we get people to take saving and the value of a dollar seriously when the five has a giant purple “5” on the back?

This multi-colored atrocity was put into place because it was thought to be much harder to counterfeit. That may have been a legitimate goal twenty years ago when this nonsense started, but today anybody with a $500 scanner/printer and some expensive paper can make a passable copy of any bill. It won’t be perfect, but it will be plenty good enough to buy lunch at McDonalds.

And if we are serious about getting rid of the $1 bill, possibly the least valuable paper bill currently produced in the developed world, we need to stop printing them. People will get used to dollar coins pretty quickly if the alternative is getting a pocketful of quarters in change. We can reuse the iconic portrait of Washington on the twenty or the fifty, as neither Jackson nor Grant really deserve that much adulation.

We also need to stop making pennies. The fact that it costs the mint more than one cent to make something they then sell for one cent isn’t as funny as it once was. (Okay, so it’s still a little funny.) At the height of the commodity price bubble it actually made good business sense to melt pennies down for their copper and zinc. (Which is illegal, by the way.) We stopped minting half cent coins in 1857. They were then worth about 12 cents in today’s money.

Musings | Frank Curmudgeon | March 18, 2009 1:00 pm

48 Comments

By SJ, March 18, 2009 @ 4:41 pm

I liked your admonishment of the presidents

This is a pretty funny series; looking forward to the rest of it =)
By Mabinogi, March 20, 2009 @ 8:23 am

I’d be fine with changing the designs back to what they were in 1990, with the caveat that we begin to make the various denominations of bills in different sizes. Those who are vision-impaired often have no way of knowing what denomination of bill they are using, making it very easy for them to get ripped off. Many countries already print their bills in different sizes; time for us to catch up.
By SWG, March 20, 2009 @ 11:52 am

I traveled in Belarus in the 1990′s. Their currency, the Belorussian ruble, was pegged at 5-to-1 to the Russian ruble. Thus one BR was 1/25,000 of a dollar. At least the first week I was there. By the third week it was up to 26,500 per dollar!
They make very cute bookmarks when laminated. People love them as gifts, including the 5,000BR note – worth less than 20 cents.

My theory is that whenever a country prints a currency where the cost of the unit bill (i.e., one dollar or one ruble) is more than the face value, their economy is heading toward the toilet.

As your kids have probably already said more than once, “are we there yet?”
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