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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 Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is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?
Based on talking to my grandparents (very long-lived, so I heard many stories), the inflation numbers downplay the skew. There's no way a working class guy making the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what my grandfather made in 1950/60/70 could ever purchase the quality of life that he was able to afford for his family with a stay at home wife and passel of kids.
I suspect this is a skewed recounting. My grandparents married as teenagers, and would not have been able to afford the life that they had today(rent prices would be out of reach), but they also describe working long and undesirable hours, eating cuts of meat that contemporary Americans largely consider beneath them(as a minority of the meal; they ate mostly rice and pasta), relying on family and church assistance, etc.
When people talk about postwar prosperity in general there's a tendency to overstate it and align it with contemporary values, which doesn't work. Primarily for the reason that a typical 1960s lifestyle involved an amount of thrift that would seem foreign to the average young person talking about how we used to be able to get ahead. The first time my mother ate in a restaurant was on her first date with my father. What was my grandfather's job? He owned an HVAC company. Granted, it was a small residential HVAC company with just him and his brother, but the idea of someone like that not eating in restaurants would be completely foreign to contemporary society. Even when I was a kid in the 90s, eating in a restaurant was a rare treat. Nowadays I cannot even go to McDonald's on a Sunday morning unless I want to wait for an hour due to the sheer number of Doordash orders from people willing to spend $30 on an egg McMuffin because they're too damn lazy to leave the house. The same people who rhapsodize about how much better things must have been in the 60s are the same ones who give me funny looks when I tell them I haven't done any international travel. Growing up, I felt rich because we went on a big family beach vacation every year. For most kids I knew, a vacation wasn't a yearly thing. For some, it was a never thing. Now it seems like people take their kids on multiple trips per year. A paralegal at work flies with his wife and kids to Disney World multiple times per year. Either his wife is pulling in big bucks or they just live on the cusp of nothing because I make significantly more than him, but I wouldn't dream of spending that much on travel.
With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.
The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.
Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.
I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).
No, you will not buy a house through extreme thrift- my grandparents could not do what they did back then today, because housing costs are too high. But there really is a strain that thinks people in the past could doordash regularly and take multiple vacations a year on normal working class incomes, whereas realistically the mid to late twenthieth century American experience was, except for the very wealthy, one of extreme thrift to maintain far lower consumption standards than the zoomers feel entitled to.
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