The Treasury just killed the penny. That is the wrong fix for the right problem. The problem is not the coin. The problem is that a dollar today buys about what a nickel bought in 1940. We did not lose the penny's usefulness. We lost the dollar's.
The fix is not eliminating the smallest unit of our currency. The fix is putting the zeros back where they belong. I am proposing a one-time redenomination of the US dollar to its 1940 valuation, a straight 95 percent markdown of every price, wage, deposit, and debt on the same day, at the same ratio, for everybody. Call it a hard reset on the numbers, not a change in what anyone actually owns.
Most people who float this idea are actually asking for something else. A redenomination is bookkeeping. Mexico did it in 1993 when the peso had inflated so badly that grocery receipts looked like phone numbers. They knocked three zeros off everything at once. Your salary, your rent, your savings account, your mortgage, all divided by 1,000 on the same morning. Nothing real changed. You were exactly as rich or as broke the next day as you were the day before. What changed was that the numbers made sense again.
That is what I am proposing for the dollar, at a 20-to-1 ratio instead of 1,000-to-1. This is not debt relief. It is not a wealth transfer. Anyone selling you the version where your mortgage shrinks 95 percent while your paycheck stays the same is selling you a default, not a reform, and they should say so plainly instead of hiding it behind the word "revaluation." What I am arguing for here is the honest version: everything moves together, and the only thing that changes is legibility.
Redenomination fixes that without touching a single person's real position. Under a 1940-scale dollar, a diner breakfast that runs $9 today prints at roughly 45 cents. A Coke that runs $2.50 comes back to about 12 cents, closer to the nickel it was built to cost. A decent lunch at $14 lands around 70 cents. None of that is a discount. Your wages redenominate the same 20-to-1, so your buying power is identical the next morning. What is different is that the price finally looks like what the thing is worth, instead of a number that has drifted so far from its origin that the coin minted to represent it got discontinued out of embarrassment.
This is where the penny comes back in, and this time it earns its keep. At 1940 valuation, a penny buys something again, roughly what a nickel buys now. Sales tax rounds sensibly. Vending machines make sense. A kid's allowance means something. We would not be resurrecting a coin nobody wants. We would be restoring the coin to the job it was minted for.
I said this is not debt relief and I meant it. If you are underwater on a mortgage hoping a redenomination bails you out, it will not, because your creditor's number and your number move together. The only people who benefit from confusing that point are the ones hoping you will not read past the headline. What redenomination buys is not net worth. It buys a currency that a normal person can hold in their head again, prices that fit on a menu without three extra digits, and a penny that is not an insult to the concept of currency. That is a smaller win than the populist version of this argument promises. It is also the only version that is actually true.
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Ben
iu, kiun vi fidas, estas unu el ni