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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?
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)
They can already buy USDC or USDT.
And they do, often. Physical cash has its own niche though.
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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.
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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.
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