This is (very) mildly stimulative/inflationary, and in the time leading up to en expected re-basing, accelerates the phase-out of the 1¢ penny (as people hoard in expectation of a 5x return). But as of the moment of re-basing, it flushes all those penny-jars out into spending/circulation.
Congress could do this tomorrow, effective immediately or in a week or month. Maybe the Treasury Department/Administration could do it on their own authority.
(The only significant opposition is likely to be from suppliers of nickel-minting metals. So maybe we just rebase pennies as 10¢.)
I do think enough people believing this could happen, and thus hoarding pennies, could increase its likelihood.
It'd grow a popular constituency for the rebasing, and create a change shortage that's most-easily addressed by incentivizing the release of instantly-more-valuable penny hoards.
Fill your jars, then pass the idea on!
(Does anyone know someone high up in this '4chan' memetic-prankster cooperative I keep hearing about? Nah, they'd probably just trick Congress into doing something useless like rebasing the penny to 4¢.)
They also say, 'Liberty', 'In God We Trust', & 'E Pluribus Unum'. Lots of writing on government-issued materials is false, ceremonial, outdated, or overridden by later acts.
If it really bothers you, you can file that off your pennies before spending them at 5¢ value. We won't mind.
The $2 bills are currency. He recombines them to create funny & thought-provoking situations, including encounters with local police & Secret Service, that test the boundaries of what's allowed & what's trusted.
Unless you are committing fraud, like falsely trying to claim it has a value other than what it actually does, defacing currency isn't illegal. So trying to pass off a penny as being worth 5 cents today by filing it down would violate that law, but if they really were worth 5 cents, it would be fine.
This is the only sensible solution. I don't know of a single thing that I could buy with a nickel, let alone a penny. I think there is some candy that's still sold for a dime, so having a penny worth that much would have at least some utility. The U.S. half-cent coin was withdrawn in 1857, when it was worth about $.15 today!
how about rebasing the dollar to $10 so that the penny has the worth of 10¢, and then apply a one-time progressive wealth tax to pay for saving the economy from collapse while also addressing the regressiveness of that action? maybe call it an anti-revolution tax.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html
This is (very) mildly stimulative/inflationary, and in the time leading up to en expected re-basing, accelerates the phase-out of the 1¢ penny (as people hoard in expectation of a 5x return). But as of the moment of re-basing, it flushes all those penny-jars out into spending/circulation.
Congress could do this tomorrow, effective immediately or in a week or month. Maybe the Treasury Department/Administration could do it on their own authority.
(The only significant opposition is likely to be from suppliers of nickel-minting metals. So maybe we just rebase pennies as 10¢.)