Sunday, September 28, 2008

Money issues

Today is Sunday September the 28th. The US federal government is about to take on 350-700 billion dollars in extra debt in order to save the economy. How is barrowing money from China or another country to give to a companies that made so many bad choices that they are going bankrupt is going to help our economy? A fool and his money are soon parted. The citizens of the US are soon to be parted from a lot of their money. (I think there is a lessen here).

A few thoughts on how we got here.

1. We stared out (as a country) with a gold and silver concept of money. These metals have worked as a type of money for many years and many societies. We stated there.
2. Than we made paper money that was a convenient means of handling money, but could be exchanged for its value at any time. Kind of like the concept of gambling chips where there must be cash kept to cover all chips issued (at least according to Oceans 11). In this system the dolor could not drop very far as a currency even if all other economic factors where falling like rocks.
3. We than decided that Uncle Sams word was as good as anything.
4. We now have a dolor that is worth very little compared to a few years back.

If we had stayed at step 2 this would not prevent the problems of counter fitting ether by locals or other governments. However the use of real gold and silver would.
I know packing around a pound or so of metal would be annoying when you go shopping, but would it really be worse then our current problem? A stable gold currency would almost eliminate inflation, but not harm economic growth. It could also limit crime as a person could only steal as much money as they could carry. :

I propose a rapid adoption of a Gold standard and the actual use of gold or silver for the bulk of our currencies. It is not a perfect quick fix to the problems we have, but it could effectively prevent these sort of problems from happening again. Yes if a major now unknown vain with millions of tons of gold is found in the world our currency would be in trouble. I’m not worried.

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