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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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The penny is due to be eliminated in 2026. I think that does not go far enough. Here is my proposal for reforming the cash system:

  1. Eliminate all coins other than the quarter. Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless. Half dollars are extinct, and every attempt the government makes to introduce a dollar coin ends in failure because there is already a perfectly good dollar bill. But the quarter is still useful to pay for laundry.

  2. Pass a law that businesses must advertise after-tax prices, not before-tax prices. The United States is stuck in a shitty equilibrium where businesses advertise a fake price but nobody can break out of it because if you advertise the actual price your prices look higher and you lose costumers. Other countries have arrived at the correct equilibrium of advertising true, after-tax prices. Since coordinating the move from shitty equilibria to good equilibria is what the government is for, let's do that. As a corollary, prices must be advertised as multiples of $0.25. If for some reason a price ends up indivisible by quarters (e.g. a 30% off sale on a product worth $1.25), then round.

  3. Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.

Thoughts?

I would like to selfishly use your post to get on my own personal numismatic hobby horse: we should stop putting real people on our money (I might be willing to make a singular exception with George Washington). It's monarchical and anti-American. The only people on our money should be idealized personifications of American values like Lady Liberty, Columbia, and Blind Justice, joined by other American symbols like the Bald Eagle, Buffalo, and Liberty Bell.

The quarter should be replaced with Benjamin Franklin's original "Mind Your Business" cent design, the first and best designed coin in American history.

I would eliminate pennies, nickels, and dimes as you suggest, but bring back a redesigned half dollar coin as well. I also prefer dollar coins to bills, and think having both in circulation is silly. The price reform is sensible, but as others have pointed out the $200 bill would mostly just help the money laundering industry.

I prefer the coins simply because most of the times im using a dollar is in a vending machine because a coke or bag of chips is more than a dollar. And really I think bills should be reserved for denominations of money that would buy more than mere snacks.

The thing about changing how US currency works is that most people have a really hard time getting used to new coins and bills. We tried to have a $2 bill but many people just couldn’t adjust to the new type of bill and it didn’t really catch on. Ditto with multiple attempts to have a $1 coin.

It’s almost as if a large part of our population learns how coins and bills work at a young age, and that knowledge becomes fossilized and doesn’t change.

Multiple countries have changed which side of the road they drive on, adopted the metric system, or switched the alphabet used to write their official language, so clearly such reforms are possible, even if they cause a great deal of temporary confusion. The question is simply whether the inconvenience is worth it and if the political will exists.

changed which side of the road they drive on, adopted the metric system, or switched the alphabet used to write their official language, so clearly such reforms are possible

Examples of big, dramatic changes. It is obvious to people that they need to adjust, so they will. You could do a same thing with US currency, reinvent all new coin and bill designs and issue them.

In comparison, it is not a surprise why introducing a singular new denomination won't catch on if it is not immediately needed and people can keep using the coins and banknotes they are used to.

The thing about changing how US currency works is that most people have a really hard time getting used to new coins and bills. We tried to have a $2 bill but many people just couldn’t adjust to the new type of bill and it didn’t really catch on. Ditto with multiple attempts to have a $1 coin.

That's why my proposal only eliminates coins. It doesn't add any. It does add a new bill, but one I think is easier to understand than a $2 note.

It’s almost as if a large part of our population learns how coins and bills work at a young age, and that knowledge becomes fossilized and doesn’t change.

I've noticed that, too. I mean, it doesn't help that American coins refuse to have a large Arabic numeral indicating their worth like most coins of the world do, instead using arcane terms like "dime", or spelling out the numbers in English. But I see foreigners have the same confusion with bills, which should be easy to read and use. That tells me they just memorize money by rote and cannot adjust to the slightest changes in design or denominations, the way most algebra students become completely lost if you change X and Y to A and B.

One sort of odd thing is that the $2 bill is not actually that uncommon, objectively: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coin_currcircvolume.htm There are about half as many of them as the $5, and nobody would be especially surprised to see a $5. But people don't spend/circulate them for what I can only assume are reasons related to business cash drawers not having a dedicated slot, so you'll never get them as change.

The only place I've ever been that used $2 bills was a local strip club that gave them to you as change rather than singles.

anecdote but when i worked as a cashier 20 years ago, we were told to always keep one $2 billa the bottom and never give it out. That way, if someone robbed the cash register, it was relatively easy to trace the $2 bill. Maybe there's a lot of small businesses keeping them around for that purpose?

Honestly, I think most of them are probably sitting in desk drawers and piggy banks because people think they're uncommon enough to be cool and not worth spending over two $1 bills. I remember my parents often using $2 bills for fun little things like the tooth fairy or hiding them in easter eggs.

A long while back when I was a troll-y 20-something I walked into a drugstore and bought a newspaper. This was back in the days of 50¢ papers, to be clear.

I paid with a shiny new Susan B. Anthony dollar coin I just got as change from a post office.

The poor cashier.

She looked at the coin thinking that it's a quarter and looked up like I was stupid. Then she looked back down and realized it wasn't a quarter. She looked back up at me with a WTF expression. Back at the coin. Rung it up as a dollar. The register opened. She looked down at the drawer. Then back up at me with a "why did you do this to me?" look. Down at the drawer. I think she chucked it with the dollar bills. Back up at me with a scowl. Drawer to retrieve a couple quarters to hand to me.

This was easily 30 years ago and I still have it burnt into my memory.

I expect it would play out the same today.

I recall dealing with both that and the $2 bill a lot in college. The ticket machines for the train didn't take cards, and for some reason gave dollar coins as change, so if I only had $20s I now had 18 Susan B. Anthonys in my pocket. Then one of the officers in my frat had the bright idea of giving $2s as change at our parties, so people would associate us with those and I guess come to parties more. Must have annoyed the hell out of cashiers.

You just unearthed repressed memories of me trying to get home from college and my pants falling down from the weight of all those damn Susan B. Anthony and Sacagwea coins from the train station.

They figured out that a few million people said "it looks just like a quarter" and the modern dollar coins are colored gold so they can't be mistaken for quarters. They are still the same size and weight so vending machines can handle them.

Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.

If we actually want it to be done we should have Donald Trump's face on the bill. Or maybe also introduce a $1,000 bill with Trump's face.

Just think, Trump could be the face of stockpiles of US currency in countries which don't have a stable currency of their own.

(to be clear I would unironically support this)

Just think, Trump could be the face of stockpiles of US currency in countries which don't have a stable currency of their own.

They can already buy USDC or USDT.

And they do, often. Physical cash has its own niche though.

We had a $1,000 bill, it had Grover Cleveland's face on it. We also used to have a $5,000 bill (James Madison) and a $10,000 bill (Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary that introduced the modern day banknote). They were all made to be used by big banks to facilitate interbank transactions, and in the 1960s they were discontinued because we didn't need to move bills around to move money between banks anymore. I wonder how difficult it would be to bring them back?

I believe the larger bills were discontinued largely to inhibit illegal activities, making it more difficult to store and move large quantities of cash without tracking. As with many goverment regulations, it had the unfortunate knock-on effect of making life more difficult for law-abiding citizens.

I can remember having a $500 bill in the late eighties, having colored up a summer's worth of high school job savings. I ended up dropping that in the church collection plate as one of my last acts as a believer.

Also a 100,000 dollar bill, again for use between major banks only. Private handling of one was illegal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-thousand-dollar_bill

The 100k only existed as a gold certificate (and therefore illegal for private individuals to hold during the New Deal era when private holdings of gold were restricted). The 500, 1k, 5k and 10k existed in all forms of US currency including legal tender Federal Reserve Notes ("green" money). The original Binion's Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas (home of the WSOP) had a tourist attraction where you could be photographed in front of a million dollars in 10k bills.

As with all obsolete US currency, the large denomination notes are still legal money and a regulated bank should accept them for deposit at face value. They are rare enough that the numismatic value normally exceeds the face value, so this never happens.

The problem is that local taxes are harder to deal with. You have state and local taxes to deal with which makes it almost impossible to make a national ad for a product if you have to include taxes. Just crossing a city/county line can change prices by a dollar or more depending on the product. If you cross a state line, you can get even bigger effects.

Also, this is not a website that I expect anyone to particularly like this line of reasoning (I don't myself), but the reason we don't have bills higher than $100 is that law enforcement and governments in general dislike high value bills due to their use in crime - untraceable cash and all that. The ECB massively regrets putting out a 500EUR note and only printed them for a decade before stopping and trying to take them out of circulation.

FATF delenda est

My understanding is that at the time the EUR was introduced in 2002, Germany still had sufficiently backward payments tech (for similar reasons to the US - basically a lot of small state-licensed banks and a culture that wanted to protect them against competition from large national banks with proper IT departments) that sometimes the only way to get a large transaction through on a same-day basis was to use a wad of 1000 DM notes. The 500 EUR note was a like-for-like replacement, and was no longer needed once Germany developed a nationwide electronic payments system that actually worked.

Yeah there's a general global effort to sunset large bills.

Eliminate all coins other than the quarter. Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless. Half dollars are extinct, and every attempt the government makes to introduce a dollar coin ends in failure because there is already a perfectly good dollar bill. But the quarter is still useful to pay for laundry.

Completely agreed. Get rid of the quarter too, dollar bills are perfectly fine for laundry machines to take. Here in the UK I just physically handled my first Charles III coin this week two years after his coronation, and it was a special edition sold by the royal mint as a collectible.

Pass a law that businesses must advertise after-tax prices, not before-tax prices.

Again completely agreed, it's weird how the USA seems to be that one single country in the world where the price you see on labels is not the price you pay.

Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was.

Nah, if anything scrap the $100 and $50 bills, larger denominations just help with money laundering. Take a page of out India's book when it scrapped its high value notes.

Nah, if anything scrap the $100 and $50 bills

The total at US grocery stores can easily go into the triple digits.

larger denominations just help with money laundering

And with being able to buy food without needing the approval of one's bank.

Again completely agreed, it's weird how the USA seems to be that one single country in the world where the price you see on labels is not the price you pay.

Canada add GST (their equivalent of VAT) and provincial sales tax at the till in the same way as America.

Interesting, I've never been to Canada but that's good to know. I think it's a common North American bug then.

How do you deal with the fact that digital money, including credit cards, makes 25 cent multiples basically pointless? Do digital spenders get screwed or helped by these price increments? Is it really the case that businesses with low-cost items (eg grocery stores) do not have 5-20 cent price increments currently? Surely not.

Canada already rounds cash purchases to $0.05, and it works fine. Sure, you can avoid a $0.02 upcharge or get a $0.02 discount when using cash, but nobody cares about that much money.

That being said, I wouldn't fix prices at $0.25 increments, at least at the low end. There is a real difference in price between a $0.65 can of soup and a $0.85 one, despite both rounding to $0.75. Maybe one cent increments up to five dollars (no more 9/10 of a cent for gas), and 25 cent increments after that.

El Salvador uses US money, specifically a cartoonish amount of interesting US 1 dollar coins: https://imgur.com/a/6wcXnGi

An average meal costs $1.50-2.50 (although little Caesars is still $5), a milkshake perhaps 50 cents. 3 amazing tamales for $1. A furnished bedroom with private bathroom for 2 in a central location $5-7.

A furnished bedroom with private bathroom for 2 in a central location $5-7.

Per night? I assume that's not the rate to buy.

Yes. But I bought a 14 room place for $20k. There's a central courtyard ringed by various rooms, one side's dilapidated but the others are ok. I put garage doors on the street facing rooms and rent them out to small businesses.

Very Roman of you!

Price including the sales tax is the norm in Europe, the lack of it was one of the biggest culture shocks the last time I was in the states. I understand some jurisdictions have passed laws against drip-pricing - the idea that the price indicated must be the final price (i.e. including the sales tax) seems like an obvious extension of that principle.

What do you need a $200 bill for?

We're in an interesting situation where inflation has made these chicken shit denominations worthless but large denominations are not useful since big transactions are handled by check, card, wire, etc.

I don't even know when is the last time I've held a $100 bill despite selling my last car for cash money. I got an envelope of twenties for it.

We're in an interesting situation where inflation has made these chicken shit denominations worthless but large denominations are not useful since big transactions are handled by check, card, wire, etc.

An "interesting situation" that almost seems like a squeeze to impose digital currency.

This "squeeze" has been happening since checks were invented during the Song dynasty. It turns out that people find it useful and convenient to make transactions without carrying cash or bullion.

Apparently most $100 bills are used in the black market: https://www.moneyandbanking.com/commentary/2017/11/12/cash-is-king-but-100-bills-are-for-crooks

Returning to the present, why is 90 percent of the U.S. increase in circulation accounted for by $100 bills? ... To put it simply, most of the U.S. currency in circulation is almost surely being used by criminals.

Which to be fair, could just as easily be things like non-licensed garage sales and used car sales skipping sales tax. But that's still a crime, and you can see why the government isn't eager to make that stuff easier. But hey, maybe if inflation continues, the $100 will soon be as practical for normal purchases as the $20.

About 80% of $100 bills are outside the US. It isn't clear whether they are being used by crooks or as a bullion-equivalent by normies who don't trust their local currencies.

Based on these stats that works out as about $1.5 trillion of Benjamins held outside the US (15 billion notes), representing an interest-free loan to USG that covers a few percent of the national debt.

My proposal is that we redefine the system at 1/25 the value is to protect more long term inflation.

The quarter becomes the ‘new penny’, and we mint a new nickel, dime, quarter and bills appropriately scaled in value

I’m in as long as relative sizes are preserved.

  • Declare goldbacks legal tender alongside the dollar

  • Introduce a $250 bill with Trump on it, but completely change the dollar bills- there should be bills of different sizes(physical length) to help the blind. A nice set of decorations in bright colours might be good- celebrate US achievement(moon landing and stuff). Put, like, Bessie Coleman on one of them but keep Andrew Jackson. None of these ‘literally who?’ Activist women like they’ve got on quarters now, though.

  • Pennies are stupid but dimes and nickels are useful for irregularly priced items. I’d say keep em.

  • Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.

Pass a law requiring prices and salaries to be advertised after tax.

The difference is that Starbucks charges everyone they sell a coffee to the same sales tax, but different employees are very likely to pay different income taxes. In Germany, you get tax credits for being married to someone without much income (Ehegattensplitting, also known as Herdpraemie (stove bonus)) and having kids. Depending on circumstances, you can also deduct a lot of different expenses from your taxes.

The closest practical solution to your proposal I can see is that jobs are required to advertise what a fictional reference employee (18yo, able-bodied, single, no kids, no other sources of income or deductible expenses) would get as a paycheck. Of course, for a single parent who already has another part time job, the amount they will make will likely be different.

Andrew Jackson belongs on US currency for irony's sake because he'd be dead set against the existence of the institution that prints it.

Jackson was one of the worst US presidents ever, he was a racist even for his own time, which is saying something. He shouldn't be on any US currency and ideally his grave and memorials get turned into spots commemorating his victims instead of him, a bit like what was done here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nrATA8gWdaQ

  • -30

Andrew Jackson secured US expansion both on the battlefield before his presidency and as president. He is both the only president to have completely paid off the national debt and the only president to need to be physically restrained from killing his own would-be assassin.

Easily top ten President.

If unclear, my suggestion is that putting Jackson on the most popular bill issued by a bank of the United States is pretty close to pissing on his grave rhetorically. His vociferous opposition to the (second) Bank of the United States is well-documented. A choice quote of his (although the provenance is questionable, it's at least aligned in sentiment with official speeches):

Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!

Was he a bad president in the sense that he was guilty of the grave moral failing of racism or in the sense that his actions sabotaged the interests and conditions of the nation? Also, in what sense of the word was his racism seen as severe?

Depends on who you include in "nation". If it's including the Native Americans then yes he sabotaged the interests and conditions of the nation.

Manifest destiny, while it as a term was only coined well after the Jackson presidency arose from and was a labeling of what Jackson was doing. It is undoubtedly severely racist, see the aftermath of the trail of tears for example.

no, the indians were not part of the American nation because they were part of the various indian nations

the indians could stay, but they would be treated as individuals and would have to renounce their indian nations and any claim of sovereignty or right to the land

his speeches and writings make pretty clear he wanted to remove the indian nations because the alternative was escalating conflict, that Americans would win it, that it would result in "utter annihilation" for the indian nations, and the only way to stop that was to raise an army to shoot Americans and even go to war against at least Georgia, which he would not do

it is the opposite of "racist even for his own time"

you don't really have a clue what you're talking about, huh?

Nah, he hated central banks and had a huge wheel of cheese in the Whitehouse on his inauguration. One of the coolest presidents.

Moreover, duels.

Put, like, Bessie Coleman on one of them but keep Andrew Jackson. None of these ‘literally who?’ Activist women like they’ve got on quarters now, though.

Coleman is definitely a "literally who." How about, like, Louisa May Alcott or something?

Everyone learned about Bessie Coleman in school and a negligible number of people think she’s not worth celebrating/learning about.

I never heard of her before today. But I had elementary school in one of the older states, not Texas. Maybe they were too busy.

Literally who? I've never heard of this bitch. And I paid more attention in school than most.

Okay, one Google search later, I now know who she is. But she is definitely not well-known. If you want a female American aviator, why not Amelia Earhart? Everybody has heard about her.

Also, judging by Wikipedia, it was not even in the US that Coleman gained fame for herself but in Europe.

Thirteen years in Californian K-12 and I've never heard of this woman in my life.

I have never heard of Bessie Coleman before today educated in the public school system of Texas, and learning who she is, I think she is not worth celebrating or learning about.

But part of the US bargain is we celebrate random black women for repeating the achievements of more capable people. Bessie Coleman seems like an unobjectionable example- using a different non-activist mildly notable black woman doesn't make much difference.

There's already a perfectly good dollar coin, the Presidental Dollar. I say keep that along with the quarter, eliminate the $1 bill and move Washington permanently to the dollar coin, and cycle through all the presidents on the quarter. Replace the half-dollar coin with a $5 coin, and put Lincoln on it. That would leave us with three useful coins. (Note the current iteration of the quarter, in 1932, was worth over $5 in inflation-adjusted dollars, so this is not a ridiculous value for a coin). Keep the $5 bill but add a $500 bill, and put JP Morgan on it.

I say keep that along with the quarter, eliminate the $1 bill and move Washington permanently to the dollar coin, and cycle through all the presidents on the quarter. Replace the half-dollar coin with a $5 coin, and put Lincoln on it.

I don't get this notion that the US needs dollar (or $5) coins. The last $1 coin program was terminated early and ended up with billions of coins in a warehouse.

The time wasn't right because there were too many useless coins.

I'm in favor. Japan has a 500 yen coin and it's quite convenient.

Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note.

We need a $500 bill. The prior one had Cleveland, who served 2 non-consecutive terms, which means the new one should have Trump. Perhaps not ideal, but the precedent has been set.

Cleveland was on the $1000 bill. McKinley was on the $500.

We should put Denali (the mountain, currently back to being McKinley) on the $500.

I see from the $500 bill article I'm not the only nitwit to conflate the two:

In June 2024, Representative Paul Gosar introduced a bill into Congress which would, if passed, require the Treasury to issue $500 bills featuring President Donald Trump

I actually wrote about this a bit ago: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/3337822/pennies-trump-target-second-term/

Here is my proposal for reforming the cash system:

This sounds like a Friday Fun Thread topic to me.

Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless.

[citation needed]

Only the penny and the nickel cost more to mint than their fiat value.

What can you buy with dimes? I pointed out that quarters still have plentiful useful in the laundromat business, among others (parking meters, etc.) I cannot think of any area where dimes are in similar use.

Whenever I give back change at my hotel, and the guest leaves it on the desk, they do not make any special effort to fish out dimes; they treat them the same as nickels and pennies.

When I pay with dollar bills (buying General Tso's chicken at a Chinese restaurant or a Slurpee/Icee at a convenience store), the cashier occasionally rounds to the nearest five cents (giving me a free one or two cents) on his own initiative, but I've never seen one round to the nearest ten cents.

Sounds like we're creating a lot of new jobs at Google figuring out how to automatically track a user's tax jurisdiction before they get shown an ad. I only vaguely remembered that there were a lot, but now that I look, I find out that Missouri has ~1,400 individual tax jurisdictions. Completely bananas.

This is a really interesting point. I really like the proposal to require showing after-tax prices. But this means that businesses have to know what the after-tax price actually is for each customer before purchasing, which is much harder and more ambiguous than doing it after purchase. For example, if customers who live in a certain city have to pay an extra tax, how would the business learn this about customers it's showing ads to? Not to mention the much larger number of ad targets than actual customers.

I think one thing that would happen is businesses would show some price based on predicted taxes, and just eat the tax difference if they predicted wrong. Or an even richer industry of fine print would spring up around price displays.

There are entire companies specializing in figuring out after tax price right now. Presumably ‘opt in based on your location’ would be a disclaimer on e-commerce sites not much different than ‘allow cookies’.

Eliminate pennies and nickels. Keep dimes and half-size half-dollars, and replace quarters with gold-colored quinters, $.2 pieces. Coins are the only arithmetic most people use, and it’s worth it to me to have them.

Alternately, return to pieces of eight: 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 of a dollar. It’s what stocks incremented in for most of Wall Street’s existence, it’s good enough for me.

Add the $200 featuring Alan Greenspan, one of Rand’s disciples.

Based.

I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3. But Ayn Rand would be funny enough that I’m on board with it.

I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3.

...unless you consume things the payment processors don't like.

If I’m going to use hard cash to buy smut, it’s going to be in singles.

Based.

There's a currency joke to be made here. I'm not sure what it should be, but I'll pretend to be upset that you didn't make it.

Based? Based on what?

Debased?

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