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Notes -
Treasury Secretary Bessent confirms limited steps toward a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump
Large denomination currency & Trump were joked about in a Friday Fun Thread at some point, but we all know jokes-->reality is a short pipeline these days. Do I expect Congress to actually pass the bill necessary to carve out an exception? No. This seems more like Bessent (who looks like a cheap clone of Donald Rumsfeld in some of the photos) doing what his boss told him to do while knowing the project is probably DOA.
Even if the stars aligned and they did pass the exception, the bills would be not be that useful. Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited. Aside from collectors and usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.
No problem, Trump is working on that, the inflation rate for April was 3.8%. (Yes, I know that it will still take 19 years for the currency to lose half its value, but I for one have trust in the man to speed this process along even more.)
Considering the eye-watering loss in value since 1969 (when the prior large bills were officially discontinued), I think The Powers That Be are fine with Americans only having bills with weak purchasing power. If you believe the official numbers, a $100 bill in 1969 had the purchasing power of $900 now. It doesn't seem like that loss ever prompted the Treasury to consider re-printing $500 and $1000 bills to try to match the former purchasing power.
Historical purchasing power always seems skewed to me. Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is acting. Is it just that we as a society have been getting so much wealthier?
I think there a lot going on that doesn’t get mentioned. First the advance of technology— in 1940, a state of the art entertainment system was a radio. In 1980, it was a color TV and maybe an Atari or later a Nintendo game system with a couple of cartridges. By 1990, you have cable, vcrs, better game systems, and so on. Food is much the same. In the early twentieth century, mustard was spicy, and now it’s like not even comparable to the mild spicy food that you eat all the time. The sheer amount and variety that we expect is different. They felt rich if they had a nice family car, a color TV, and simple food in a fridge that didn’t automatically make ice cubes was plenty. We’d consider that poverty, but they felt rich because technology was moving fast and they could afford to partake. We see a decline where things that used to be things the average person could expect are gradually becoming unaffordable. The mid century saw people able to afford to eat out more, and in the 2020s people can’t afford to eat out as much as they could have 20 years ago. The same is happening with other stuff. The standard of living for most average people is declining.
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