U.S. Money May Change

A U.S. federal district court judge just ruled in the first salvo of what may prove to be a long legal battle to make U.S. paper money less uniform.

The American Council of the Blind sued The U.S. Treasury Department, claiming that the uniform size and coloring of U.S. paper money makes it so difficult for the visually impaired to tell different bills of different denominations apart, that it violated the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, a landmark law in providing civil rights to the disabled in the United States.

The judge agreed and said the Treasury needs to make our paper money more accessible to the blind. No specific method was ordered, but the easiest one would obviously be to have different bills of different colors and sizes. Other methods, like adding braille to the bills, don't seem to be viable if we want the bills to have a long circulation life.

But don't go getting a European style wallet just yet. It could be a decade or more before you see these new bills, if you see them at all. There's little doubt that the Treasury will spend millions of dollars of taxpayer funds mounting a series of appeals to take this all the way to the Supreme Court if need be. Such a battle could take years.

And, were it to finally be decided in favor of changing our currency, expect another 5-10 years after that for the Treasury to study, design, and phase in the new bills.

I guess, since this is in the "Dangerous Thoughts" section of my site, I should express an opinion. My opinion is that the Treasury used the wrong arguments. The idea of these rules making the money easier to counterfeit are bogus. Start from the Euro's security features as a base, and then try to improve from there.

Where the Treasury should have based its argument is in the fact that the American people are too dumb to handle a new currency.

An example...

2-dollar bills have been in circulation for decades. But they're so little-known, a Best Buy manager called the cops on a guy who tried to pay with 2-dollar bills. The cops arrested him and handcuffed him to a pole until the feds could show up and tell them that it was real money. The cashier who called the manager, the manager who called the cops, and the cops who arrested him while they called the feds... none of them knew that the 2-dollar bills were real, legal money.

And the 2-dollar bills use the same size and colors as other U.S. currency. Wait until we have bills of differing sizes and colors. At Wal-Marts across the country, there will be loud pops as cashiers' heads explode.

If the Treasury wants a decent chance at stopping this currency-change juggernaut, I believe their only defense is the fact that new currency would be unfair to stupid people who could not intellectually adapt to it. And since the American stupid outnumber the American blind by a good measure, they'd win.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Dangerous Thoughts, Politics & Religion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.