Corruption in low places

My observations follow this very brief article:

December 14, 2011
US stops minting $1 coins
Rick Moran

They couldn't get the public to accept them because they were too close to the quarter in size or were too bulky to carry around.

Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. government, its vaults stuffed with 1.4 billion one-dollar coins bearing the likenesses of dead presidents, has had enough of them. It is going to curtail production.

"Nobody wants them," Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday. That is for sure: The Mint says there are enough $1 coins sitting in Federal Reserve vaults to meet demand for a decade, and the inventory was on track to hit two billion by 2016.

More than 40 percent of the coins that are minted are returned to the government unwanted, the Treasury said. The rest apparently sit in vending machines -- one of the few places they are widely used -- or in the drawers of coin collectors.

What the coins don't do is get around much. In fact, the Mint has never had much luck with dollar coins. The Susan B. Anthony dollar (1979-1981, revived for one year in 1999) never caught on; some people said it was too close in size to the quarter. Neither did the Sacagawea Golden Dollars (2000-2008 ) or its successor, the Native American $1 Coin, which has the same front but a different back.

In fact, about the only supportes of the coins were the vending machine industry, which saw great potential in building new machines to handle more expensive products. But now that dollar acceptor technology has been vastly improved, the coins don't even have much backing among the vending machine lobby.

Another example of government trying to foist something on the American people that was roundly rejected.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/12/us_stops_minting_1_coins.html

Forget about members of Congress ripping off tax payers; forget about Solyndra, forget bailouts, forget earmarks, forget Jon Corzine. And while we are in a forgive and forget mood let’s turn Runyonesque character Rod Blagojevich loose. Locking up Blago is the same as locking up Nathan Detroit, Harry the Horse, and Nicely-Nicely Johnson. After all, Blago is the only honest crook in politics because he was only charging bigger crooks a fee for access to the public purse.

Let’s get down to investigating a serious crime. How was the decision to turn a dollar into a quarter arrived at? The only logical explanation I ever came up with was that paper money changed hands so the public would put the dollar coin in vending machines thinking it was a quarter? And let’s not forget slot machines! Putting a dollar in a quarter slot would give new meaning to the term “One-armed bandit.”

The thing that really annoyed me back when the Susan B. Anthony dollar was first minted is that it was not the size of a 50¢ coin. The wisenheimers couldn’t settle for a 50 cent markup, they had to go for the 75.

Now the question is: What to do with 1.4 billion coins?

Since foreign aid will never end, my answer is to distribute the coins to the poor in Third World countries. Send a bunch of treasury agents over and let them hand out the coins in the poorest neighborhoods, or they could drive around poor neighborhoods throwing handfuls of coins off the back of moving vehicles. My suggestion would start the money at the bottom. Call it trickle-up economics. It’s not a bad economic policy when compared to foreign aid that starts at the top and stays there.

 

I was knocking foreign aid in the final paragraph in the OP. But the enclosed article made me wonder why Pelosi and Reid don’t select a Third World country and throw the coins from moving vehicles to test their theory? No other test could be designed any better, and it’s only 1.4 billion dollars when you get right down to it. That’s a trifle when you are talking about foreign aid.

Your Christmas Present From The Democrats: Another Load of Trickle-Up Economics
by John Hayward
Posted 12/16/2011 ET
Updated 12/16/2011 ET

In the middle of delivering another tedious class-warfare sermon on Capitol Hill last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV, current net worth $3.4 million) made the rather startling assertion that millionaires who create jobs are “like unicorns – they’re impossible to find and don’t exist.”

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0cCiwJy3NM&feature=player_embedded"]Millionaire Job Creators Are Like Unicorns - YouTube[/ame]

Professor Reid went on to deliver the advanced economic theory that “only a tiny fraction of people making more than a million dollars, probably less than one percent, are actually small business owners, and only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction is a traditional job creator.”

Got that? Only a tiny fraction of small businesses owned by people who make more than a million dollars create jobs in a traditional sense. The rest of the small businesses owned by people with Harry Reid’s net worth are staffed by ghosts, robots, colonies of super-intelligent ants, and the like. You probably didn’t make it halfway through that video before you were shouting the names of rich entrepreneurs who created thousands of jobs at the screen. Don’t bother: Harry Reid can’t hear you, and he wouldn’t hear you even if he was standing in the room with you.

So… if rich people opening businesses aren’t creating jobs in the private sector, then who is? For the answer, we turn to an even greater economic genius, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA, current net worth $35.5 million.) Yesterday she repeated a theory she made famous some years ago, and which has become one of the bedrock principles of the Obama Administration: jobs are created by people who don’t have jobs, through the magic of unemployment insurance, whose extension will create 600,000 jobs. Why, that’s even better job creation than ObamaCare! And you know how right she was about ObamaCare!

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jJRT_ppAY&feature=player_embedded"]Pelosi: Extending Unemployment Benefits Will Create 600,000 Jobs--200,000 More Than Obamacare! - YouTube[/ame]

It’s the return of Trickle-Up Economics, an article of nearly religious faith on the Left these days, despite the rather stunning volume of evidence that it doesn’t work. Cast a flurry of government dollars across the deserving poor, and their rush to spend Big Government’s largesse will cause businesses to pop up all over the place and begin hiring.

Obviously liberals are in love with this fantasy, because it means Big Government gets to exercise ever-greater control over the private sector. Taxpayer money is seized and spent, while liberals get to posture as the selfless champions of the little guy. The fact that it doesn’t work is a feature, not a bug, because it creates ever greater demand for that compassionate welfare spending. Dependent constituencies are the lifeblood of collectivist politics.

It seems a bit curious that it fails as comprehensively as it does, however. Why don’t more jobs materialize to scoop up all that unemployment money? Partially, it’s due to the way unemployed people tend to spend their money – paying off debt, among other things, coupled with an entirely reasonable urge to build up cash reserves to handle necessities when those unemployment benefits eventually run out.

Another problem is that jobs are a transaction, in which value is created for both employer and employee. People create value through the work they perform to earn their paychecks, a simple point easily forgotten by those who spend their lives working the halls of Congress. Giving people money for nothing cuts out half of that value-creating transaction. Of course the results are anemic.

But the primary problem with Trickle-Up Economics, which is also part of the reason President Obama’s vaunted “payroll tax cut” hasn’t been creating many jobs, is that the stimulus effect of randomly sprinkling small change upon the populace is vastly outweighed by the tax and regulatory burdens currently applied to businesses. Forming a business, even a small one, is very difficult, more so in some states than others. When the entrepreneur goes to hire people, he runs afoul of cost-escalating regulatory obstacles, including Pelosi’s beloved ObamaCare.

Trickle-Up Economics would still be a pathetic joke if businesses really could expand rapidly, hiring people swiftly and at reasonable cost, to scoop the government cheese from the pockets of the unemployed. The punch line to the joke is coming when we can’t borrow any more money to sustain these insane levels of government spending. Meanwhile, the world Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid helped to create simply does not allow people to use their boodle from Washington in the way the Democrat leaders imagine. Maybe they should study the virtues of economic liberty harder, and stop doodling unicorns in their textbooks.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48201

 

I've looked into this idea heavily and found that money tends to trick up and trickle down. Taxation can be used as a tool to mitigate the upward flow (As we saw in the post civil war golden age) and keep the general population with cash to trickle up (This can be done on other ways then handouts i.e. subsidizing essential living expenses -no tax of food, min wage, unions, mass transit etc.). The productivity required to meet the demand of this situation will cause the money to trickle down through jobs to meet this demand. Once the money ceases to trickle up it will not trickle down and vice versa. The key is to try and find a balance between an even distribution of wealth (No incentive to innovate) and an exaggerated income gap (No demand and poor circulation of cash flow).

 

To dcaddy: If I’m interpreting you correctly you disagree with this:

laissez faire also laisser faire (noun)

1. An economic doctrine that opposes governmental regulation of or interference in commerce beyond the minimum necessary for a free-enterprise system to operate according to its own economic laws.

2. Noninterference in the affairs of others.