Jack Lew decides to see if Andy Jackson really CAN come back from the dead.

Via @BigGator5 comes this exercise in applied necromantic science:

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is expected to announce this week that Alexander Hamilton’s face will remain on the front of the $10 bill and a woman will replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the $20 bill, a senior government source told CNN on Saturday.

Can Andrew Jackson return from the dead and strangle Jack Lew with his own entrails? I don’t know, Timmy! Let’s find out!

…Seriously, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to handle this situation is to just have fives, tens, twenties, and fifties have a range of one of three people on the front. Singles are exempt because, you know, Washington; and hundreds are exempt because Ben Franklin was a stone cold playa (Lincoln will still have the penny, so as long as there’s a Batman Abe’s numismatic legacy is secure). That gives us eight slots to pander with.

Plus: Jackson doesn’t become a murderous revenant, which is always a bonus.

Moe Lane

PS: My browser has a remarkably pedestrian vocabulary: it apparently had problems with some of the more esoteric words in this post. I’ll grant ‘revenant’ is obscure, but ‘necromantic?’ On the Internet?

13 thoughts on “Jack Lew decides to see if Andy Jackson really CAN come back from the dead.”

  1. Nah. If you allow a few different faces on a 5, soon you’ll get everyone and his dog yammering to have person X on the bill too. Soon, you’ll have 10-15 different versions of each bill, which makes paying for things harder.

    Instead, make 500 and 1000 dollar bills for general circulation.

    1. Personally, I want to bring back the $500 bill and put Ronald Reagan on it. Then again, I also want to abolish the penny which has had its value destroyed by 80 years of inflation, bring back the dollar coin BUT IN THE SIZE OF A HALF-DOLLAR AND NOT THIS STUPID QUARTER-SIZED NONSENSE, then get rid of the $1 bill in favor of the $2.

      1. So because of past inflation, you’re going to encourage future inflation?
        .
        I’ve said quite a bit that’s negative towards Keynes, but he was spot-on about how inflation destroys a society. (After all, he witnessed it happen.)

        1. Many sins are committed in Keynes’ name, I think. If the government would actually SAVE money in good times, and then spend it in lean ones, like Keynes perhaps foolishly assumed that the government would if it adopted his policies…

          1. Yes to the first part. Many sins are committed in the name of Keynes that he is fully innocent of. Like Obama’s “Keynesian” economic policy, comprised almost entirely of things Keynes specifically warned never to do.
            .
            No to the second. He knew darned well that was never going to happen, and his economic philosophy is premised on deliberately misleading the public.
            (If I were to put Keynes in a nutshell, it’s that uncertainty freezes liquidity. But government acting promptly can artificially inject certainty into the market. Oversimplified, of course. But that’s the basic gist.)

        2. Back in the 1790s, the United States briefly had a coin called the mill, which was worth a 1/10th of a penny. Half-pennies were minted up until 1857. They were abandoned because their value was too small to be worth keeping track of.
          Thanks to inflation, the value of a quarter today is worth about what a penny was worth back then. That makes the modern penny worth less than half a colonial-time mill. We’re never going to have deflation that makes the modern penny worth keeping track of (and if we did, the economic consequences would be devestating); eliminating the penny is just being practical.

          1. There are few things less practical than exempting a bad actor from the consequences of their actions.
            .
            The federal government whines because it costs more to make a penny than its face value?
            Whose fault is that, exactly?
            Oh, that’s right!
            They made the bleeping bed, they can bleeping well sleep in the bleeper.

          2. This would likely result in either 1) all prices being rounded up to the nearest nickel, or else 2) all money going digital so as to keep the very useful cent.
            .
            I’ll stick with the penny, thanks.

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