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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:
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.
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.
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?
This sounds like a Friday Fun Thread topic to me.
[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.
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