Playing With Money

Published in the Desert Valley Times
May 24, 2005

After a relatively long period of monetary stability, it appears that America’s financial underpinnings are in flux.
It’s not the stock market, or the value of the dollar against the yen.
It’s money itself.
For years, American money was boring yet consistent.
Your five-dollar bill in 1973 looked just like your 1994 model.
And the biggest change in change (yes, it’s a pun, and yes, it’s a lousy one) came when pennies quit carrying wheat and began carrying advertisements for one of D.C.’s favorite tourist attractions.
(For those of you playing along at home, it’s the Lincoln Memorial building.)
Now, you can plunge your hand into a plastic casino cup full of metal money and come up with three dozen different varieties of coinage.
The fronts still look the same (kind of), but the backs are as varied as, well, as the states.
If you don’t see Washington’s mug on the front, you might be holding a quarter with a minted story about Alabama or Maryland, or you could be holding a bus token from Saskatchewan.
Like most folks, I thought the idea of each state getting their own quarter was cute in the beginning.
Now that the variety has become so diverse, you need a degree in numismatics to figure out if you’ve got enough change for that Snickers bar.
And if it’s confusing for me, what kind of torture do you think it poses for tourists visiting from other countries?
They might wonder how much a quarter is worth.
But then the subtle nuances kick in.
Is a Georgia quarter worth as much as an Ohio quarter?
If you try to use a Virginia quarter to buy North Carolina cigarettes in South Dakota, do the money police show up to take you away?
Not satisfied to keep people off-balance about their quarters, the U.S. Mint is now employing the same shell game with our nickels.
It’s still Tommy Jefferson on the front, but the back is festooned with various state mottoes and maybe even an ad for the last Star Wars episode.
But the fun doesn’t end with jingling money.
Have you seen the latest $20 bill?
No you haven’t, because they changed it again five minutes ago.
I used to suffer from a national inferiority complex, because our money was pretty boring with its shades of green, while other countries used blues and reds and purples.
Now, our newest folding money changes colors right before your eyes, with secret images and magic threads and a seeing eye over the pyramid that captures electronic images of the inside of your wallet and transfers the photos to a huge database in Washington D.C. where bureaucrats collate the information to determine whether your taxes need to be increased.
(Basically, if there is a single dollar bill remaining in your wallet, your taxes are too low and need a bump.)
I always feel guilty when I spend one of those colorful new bills, because anything that artistic deserves to be hanging on my refrigerator with a gold star and smiley face.
And have you seen the new $100 bill?
Okay, I work for the DVT, so I haven’t seen one either.
But I hear they’re tinkering with the color schemes and inserting GPS homing beacons so Uncle Sam can gather them up more easily every April 15.
I know the current currency designs (yes, another pun, but this one is marginally better) are intended to discourage lazy counterfeiters from lining up at Kinko’s, but I’ll be happy when the U.S. Treasury finally finds a version they like and declares a winner that they’re going to stick with.
Otherwise, playing Monopoly at my house is just going to get more confusing.