What should we do? First, listen to Alan Greenspan (diminish the deficit), reform our currency-reserve, and make it attractive for more countries to buy Treasury bonds. (Thanks, Japan, you rule!)
Earlier this month I read in The Economist about using Frequent-Flyer miles as the new international standard. Apparently, there are $14 trillion of these "miles" out there:
"It has been superseded not by the euro, nor(In terminal decline?, Jan 6th 2005, From: The Economist, print edition)
by the yen or yuan, but by another increasingly
popular global currency: frequent-flyer miles.
Calculations by The Economist suggest that
the total stock of unredeemed frequent-flyer miles
is now worth more than all the dollar bills in
circulation around the globe."
This is not the first time that The Economist has brought up the use of these miles. In fact, the point is raised about every six months or so! Part of me thinks they are just joking (those cheeky brits!) but maybe there is a point to this notion...
In fact, I even have a better proposal: I think we should peg the rate of our own currency to the amount of unspent coins in our own circulation. First, we have all of those funny quarters (Indiana's is the best!) and now we have a goofy nickel. This inspires weird people to "collect" them, and not spend them. However, there is another part of our economy that we should buy more shares of: those "Give a Penny, Take a Penny" jars in convenience stores! By my own calculations, there are at least $16 trillion of these pennies out there, and no one ever uses them. (Do they? I don't.) I think I will write to Mr. Greenspan about my monetary plan.
--gh
1 comment:
$16 trillion? I think your math is suspect.
I've always suspected that was the entire reason for creating those dumb new quarters in the first place - to generate revenue. Everybody's mom (seriously, I've checked - EVERYBODY'S) is saving an entire set of those quarters for all their children. So...if we estimate something like 300 million people in the U.S. - roughly more than half of them are women - that's 150 million. At least half of these must be moms - let's be very conservative and say that there are 50 million moms in America. Now say that each American mom has 2.1 children (conservative, probably). Multiply that 2.1 children by the 50 million moms by the 50 different state quarters by 25 cents apiece, and you get about $1,312,500,000 (that's right, over a billion dollars) worth of quarters just sitting around not being spent. The way I figure it, that's just a voluntary Dork Tax on people who think that a quarter from Indiana is going to be worth more than 25 cents, 20 years from now. And that's just American moms. You know Canadians are probably worse - what else have they got to do with their time?
If the gov't really wanted to make money, they should have started making $20 bills featuring the state capitols or something on the back. In fact, that's my suggestion for how we start paying off the national debt. $105,000,000,000 in just a few years....
Frequent Flyer miles. Yeah right. I'm more interested in the amount of value that is currently tied up in Showbiz Pizza/Chucky Cheese game tokens. That must be in the hundreds of millions....
-m
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