George looks good on a coin.
Club Soda and I have had our disagreements about abolishing the penny, but I think I found a currency issue we can agree on. Apparently, the United States loses a lot of money making one dollar bills. The average one dollar bill lasts for only three years.
If we changed to one dollar coins they would last for up to 30 years. Plus, coins are a lot more efficient than paper. Thankfully, there’s a Dollar Coin Alliance. I love this country. It seems like there’s a group for everything. Here are some of the benefits of moving to dollar coins.
- Billions in taxpayer savings: For the last two decades the Government Accountability Office has recommended switching to the dollar coin in order to save the American taxpayer anywhere from nearly $200 million to more than $500 million per year.
- Private sector savings: The private sector experiences even greater cost savings and increased revenues from $1 coins. Jammed $1 bills in vending machines cost the industry $1 billion in annual repair costs and lost sales. According to the transit industry, it costs six times less to process $1 coins than $1 bills.
- Consumer ease: One $1 coin is lighter to carry than four quarters and is easier to use in vending machines, parking meters, Laundromats, transit fare machines, and other coin operated equipment. Four quarters weigh nearly three times more than a $1 coin (22g vs. 8.1g). 95% of vending machines and 19 of the top 20 mass transit systems already accept dollar coins.
I’m sold. What do we have to do to make this happen? George Washington is already on the quarter. I’d leave him on the dollar coin and put Franklin D. Roosevelt on a newly designed quarter. Remember when President Obama was going to find ways to reduce waste and save money? This seems like a pretty easy idea to implement, though it will be problematic for those who frequent strip clubs.
Michael Tomasky has an op-ed in The Guardian lamenting the fate of the health care takeover being pushed by “progressives.” The article is full of generalizations, mischaracterizations, and historical inaccuracies. The piece is truly difficult to read. Tomasky’s aura of faux intellectualism is so strong he doesn’t have time to look at the details. Most liberals have this problem. It’s why Reagan said that “it’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant, they just know so much that isn’t so.” However naïve Tomasky is, he does have some self awareness.
What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama’s victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it’s been in this country for 40 years. One could believe, on a good day, not only that America would pass healthcare reform and climate change bills (that’d be the easy part), but that Israelis and Palestinians and Iranians and Syrians and Indians and Pakistanis and North Koreans and you-name-it just might all wake up one day and text one another: you know, Obama’s win suddenly makes us aware of how silly we’ve been all these years. Let’s grow up and make peace.
There’s no doubt American liberals completely misread the tea leaves regarding the election. The unfortunate truth is liberals are just as naïve about health care. Unable to clearly deliver an argument about how this utopian program will ever work they’d rather complain about the opposition. At the prospect of the losing the debate Tomasky would rather complain about “a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists.” Look down at the birthers all you want, and there’s plenty of reason to do so, but what can you say about someone who is well-educated like Tomasky who can’t even adequately explain how health care can work?
Maybe “well-educated” is a generalization. What can we say about an education system that continues to create people who are woefully ignorant about economics and history? Before we endorse changing one of the largest parts of our economy shouldn’t we have some evidence that it might work? Why should we trust people who don’t even have a firm grasp on history? Look at Tomasky’s insight about FDR:
Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today’s standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he’d intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn’t have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren’t really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn’t nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today’s version, which even has its own national disinformation “news” network.
According to Tomasky FDR was able to pass the New Deal because no one used filibusters, the opposition wasn’t well financed, and FOX News didn’t exist. Frankly, Tomasky should be embarrassed by that paragraph. He obviously has no idea about the history of the Great Depression. Four years of depression and super majorities in both the House and the Senate are the reason the New Deal passed. Furthermore Obama hasn’t faced a filibuster for any of his key agenda. Again, Tomasky displays his naivete in regard to history. He’s got all the people in the right period but all the facts wrong.
Despite all of his talents, FDR would not have been a match for FOX News.
Liberals like Tomasky are shadowboxers fighting an invisible enemy. The liberal’s true enemies in the health care debate are facts, and one of those is that we have no way to pay for health care reform. We can’t afford Medicare, the Prescription Drug Plan, or Social Security. In the grand scheme of things I don’t really care if liberals think that health care is a right. We can’t afford it, and until someone has a plan that’s worked somewhere else we should move forward with real reform.
During the campaign season Barack Obama’s souring rhetoric offered hope to all Americans. Since being sworn in the new president has become the commander and chief of gloom. The fact is that Obama’s rhetoric isn’t warranted. The nation isn’t facing the Great Depression right now. What the nation needs to hear is that this is a slowdown, they’re common, and it doesn’t require uncommon action. Instead Obama is using the slowdown for partisan political advantage. Let’s face it. The monstrosity that was just passed by Congress could have never been passed without the horrible press coverage of the economy and president’s never-ending gloomy statements. Bradley Schiller has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that hits the nail on the head.
Mr. Obama’s analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they’re also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren’t likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup. Beyond that, fearmongering can trigger a political stampede to embrace a “recovery” package that delivers a lot less than it promises. A more cool-headed assessment of the economy’s woes might produce better policies.
Obama’s policies seem more like Hoover than FDR. When the stock market crashed in 1929 Hoover took an uncommon approach to a common problem. The economy normally contracts around every ten years. Unfortunately Hoover decided government intervention was necessary. Hoover’s policies of higher tariffs, taxes, and interests rates ended up turning a recession into an depression. When FDR became president he basically adopted many of the same politics. Is it any wonder why the depression lasted until the war?
The only thing we have to fear is the government itself. The nation has been on the road to bankruptcy ever since FDR. LBJ’s Great Society pushed us faster towards the brink and no politician has been able to change the course. Now the nation is facing a recession and the current leadership is using it as an excuse to pass the single most expensive project in the history of the nation. The stimulus package costs more (adjusted for inflation), than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the race to the moon, the Korean War, the New Deal, and the invasion of Iraq. If you throw in the cost of TARP (and the glorious sequel coming soon) the US government will authorize more spending than all of those events combined plus World War II, and the Vietnam War. In other words this is the largest increase in government spending in the history of the Republic. Keep in mind unemployment is still in single digits. What is the justification for this drastic action?
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