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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
A bill recently introduced in Texas seeks to obliterate the Federal Reserve's much-maligned monopoly on currency by establishing gold and silver as legal tender — but the groundbreaking legislation, if passed, would also prohibit those precious metals from being seized by State authorities.
[...] Senator Bob Hall introduced the bill last month, which, the Tenth Amendment Center explains, "declares specifically that certain gold and silver coins are legal tender, and prohibits any tax, charge, assessment, fee, or penalty on any exchange of Federal Reserve notes (dollars) for gold or silver. The bill authorizes the payment of taxes and fees in gold & silver in certain circumstances. It would also prohibit the seizure of gold or silver by state authorities."
Would this matter in a nation where money is mostly plastic nowadays anyway?
Source: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/texas-bill-gold-silver-money-federal-reserve/
(Score: 1) by fyngyrz on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:32PM
"stabilizing effect"
I'm not really on board with your implied meaning for these words. Other than the meaning "it would have been much worse otherwise", the huge increase in cost of living leads me to say that the value of the dollar has been both unstable and massively corrosive.
Since the 1970's, the value of a dollar has dropped considerably as in wages against costs, in that what it can do for you is much, much less in almost every corner of the economy with the exception of electronics and its subclasses, such as computers, cameras and AV gear, to ID a few. Those are certainly useful things, but the cost of a loaf of bread has risen from 36 cents in 1970 to $1.35; the median cost of a new home in 1970 was $22,300, and by 2012 (latest I could find government figures for), it had risen to $212,300. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has risen from 36 cents in 1970 to about $3.00 today. A (private) college education's yearly tuition has risen from $1,561 to $33,480 in 2017. The cost of an average new car has risen from $3,542 in 1970 to $33,560 in 2017. And so on.
Food looks a little less expensive in re wages (see below); other things tend to look a lot more expensive. And I have to say, having a little extra leverage to buy food doesn't make up for the lost leverage on all the other things one must buy to get along in a similar lifestyle as compared to the 1970's.
Working at McDonalds at the counter, in 1970 your hourly wage was likely $1.75, while today it's likely $8.37. That's the key metric by which the imposition of inflation upon the population should be measured, IMHO; it's a 4.7x increase. Anything larger than that for any given cost is a loss to the individual. Many of the common costs I cited above are in the 10x range. That tells you what's really going on. And stability... that's not any reasonable description of stability. A McDonald's wage is very likely a solid index for the bottom of the economy; that's where people experience the impact of the unstable, corrosive dollar the most. At the upper end, it's irrelevant -- if you're a millionaire or more, this stuff is laughably irrelevant (and those people tend to be the ones telling us the economy is fine. Imagine that.) Hence my application of the average or median expenses against the lowest wage earners.