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.

King Francis: Spam

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 email spam.

Henceforth, there will be a federal tax of 1/100 of a cent on every email sent to a US email address. Each citizen will receive an annual $1 credit, meaning that the first 10,000 emails they send in a year will be free.

Poof.  No more spam.

Well, at least no more ads for male enhancement pills and desperate entreaties from relatives of deposed African dictators.  Legitimate businesses may find that sending emails to a relatively focused list of recipients is worth the $100 per million cost.  We can live with that.

King Francis: Airline Security

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 airline security.

I hereby decree that for the next six months all airlines will divide their flights randomly into two types, safe and unsafe.  All airports will be similarly divided.  Passengers will have the option of booking travel on either side, the half with long lines to have your toothpaste confiscated and socks inspected, or the dangerous side, which will recreate the security precautions of the late 1970s.

After the six month period, the security regime with more business will become the new standard going forward.  I don’t think there is much question as to which level of security will win.   I am sure we can find something useful for the unemployed TSA inspectors to do.

If you missed it, there was a great article in The Atlantic last year about the “security theatre” going on at our airports, to great expense and inconvenience.  (I even used it as an analogy in this clever post.)  What we are doing now is both largely ineffectual and yet still hugely disproportionate to the threat of terrorism.  Why do we do it?  I think that’s a complicated bit of group psychology, but part of it is that a lot of us assume that although we personally would prefer not to have this level of security, everybody else is happier with it.

Last Frugal Friday for a While

Not much on the frugal front to report, and frankly I’m worried the Frugal Friday thing is getting a bit tired.  And frugality is beginning to confuse me.

Not Made of Money picked up the Homemade Maple Syrup post I discussed  last week as a guest post.  Just in case I was being too subtle last time, what they are discussing is making fake maple syrup, which is awful stuff, and real maple syrup is very cheap to make yourself, provided you have the right kind of tree and some simple tools.  (It is also, I am told, hard work.  I buy the stuff in the store like everybody else.)

Not Made of Money also had a post on what has become a recurring theme here,  Other Uses for Dryer Sheets.  I guess I must be really missing out, because I’ve never used a dryer sheet in my life, even for its intended purpose.  I guess I just assumed that a frugal person would also forgo this luxury.

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Buy Index Funds, Not Stocks

Moolanomy has a regular feature called “Ask The Expert With Larry Swedroe” in which readers ask a question related to investing.  Last week the question came from the host of Gather Little by Little, who insists on calling himself  Glblguy.  Apparently in earnest, he asked “When deciding to purchase individual stocks, what process do you go through to determine if the stock is a good buy or not?”

Swedroe was firm and to the point in his reply.  “No one should own individual stocks.”

As painful as it is for me to write this, I basically agree.  Painful not just because agreeing with others is against my nature, but because I love buying individual stocks.  Few things are as much fun.  The stock market is an ever-changing universe of stories, ideas, and theories of the future where I can match wits with other participants and actually bet money on the proposition that I am smarter than everybody else.  Awesome.

But I am a professional.  I trade stocks for a living.  (Or at least I used to, before, uh, certain unfortunate developments.)  You,  I am assuming, are a productive member of society with a job producing a thing or service of value.

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