I get confused here, I'll admit it.
Wow, what a profound realization you've had! I am astonished!
I made the comment a couple years ago, mostly in jest, that we should pay off the national debt by simply printing the currency to do so. This is essentially the same idea, but is actually now apparently being seriously considered. With such a genius idea, I have to wonder why all the unnecessary class warfare rhetoric? Why spend all this political momentum, time and energy, fomenting hatred for people with wealth, and trying desperately to establish government mechanisms to separate them from it? Why must any of us do without? If we can print money and pay off the debt, why stop there? Why not just print everyone a trillion dollars while the press is still running? Imagine, every homeless person, every needy individual, every single mother and fatherless child, will all the sudden have a trillion dollars! Life would all be great, right? Right? Take another pull on the bong, and think about this for a minute.
While our currency is no longer backed by gold, all currency has to be backed by something. If our currency is not backed by gold reserves, it is backed by other assets and resource value. That is what currency represents, a value. It is what makes it different from a simple piece of paper. Pull any currency out of your wallet, and notice... it doesn't say "money" anywhere on it. What you have, is something from the Federal Reserve, which represents a value. That value may be gained or lost in a variety of ways, but the most ardent aspect of the value is how much of this currency is in existence at the time. The more of it, the less it is worth in value.
Now.... You all know how we hear stories from time to time, about people in China who are working for $.03 an hour, and we're appalled that some people in this world are made to work for slave wages like this? Okay... Let's jump ahead to the future, when the value of our dollar is basically worth in value, about a half penny? A $6 an hour salary, is worth about $.03 on the world market. But we'll have no debt, and everyone will have gotten their trillion 'dollars' worth about $30 in actual value, when all is said and done. The fact that it would cost you more to transport it around, than what it was worth, you can see the need for a coin.
