Thirty-six Trillion (Part 3)

It’s been a few months since I last saw John.  In case you have forgotten or have not yet been introduced, John is the big orange cat that lives at the end of the cul-de-sac down the street.  He’s a great mouser, so whenever I see him, I know the neighborhood mice are in peril.  Then again, if I don’t see him, it might mean that he’s already caught all the pesky mice in the area.  So, I don’t know which is better.  I still enjoy his visits.

When I introduced you to John earlier, we were contemplating the nation’s thirty-six trillion-dollar debt and the seemingly impossible financial circumstance that we find ourselves because of it.  I suspect that John had difficulty imagining just how great a sum of money that was, but then again, I don’t think John really cared.  He’s just a cat after all, and that isn’t something that any cat would be concerned about.  Sad to say, the national debt has since ballooned to somewhat closer to thirty-nine trillion dollars.  Apparently, not many people are concerned about it either.

Though John doesn’t much care, I was discussing it with my daughter one day, and she suggested that, if we’ve determined that we can never retire the debt with actual dollars, maybe we could try paying it off with Monopoly money.  Afterall, once the country goes bankrupt and the almighty dollar collapses and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, couldn’t we pay off the debt with some other equally worthless currency?  Monopoly money would be a lot easier to print.  In fact, just about anyone could do their patriotic duty by printing the bills on their home printer.

So how much Monopoly money would we need?  Well, despite the fact that the debt has grown by another three trillion dollars, let concentrate on paying down thirty-six trillion for now.  If we can get that paid off, another three trillion, whether with Monopoly money or worthless dollar bills, shouldn’t present too great of a challenge.

The standard Monopoly set has bills of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, and 500.  You might notice that there is no $ sign on any of the bills.  I suspect adding the $ may be illegal.  While the properties, utilities, and railroads the bills are intended to purchase have $ values, the value of the currency is implied.  If a player wants to purchase Baltic Avenue for $60, it is implied that a 10 and a 50 of these bills will complete the transaction even though there is no $ sign on the bills.  The value of all of the bills included in a standard set totals 15,140, the implied $ value.

If we assume a one-to-one ratio of Monopoly money bills to U.S. dollars ($15,140), it would require the money from 2,377,807,133 sets to pay off thirty-six trillion.  In case you have difficulty reading the number because there are so many digits, it is well over two billion.  Considering the fact that it has already taken a little more than 90 years for 275 million copies of the game to be printed and sold worldwide, maybe Monopoly money isn’t the answer.  If we printed sets at the same rate (275 million in 90 years), it would take over 700 years to print enough to pay off the debt.  Obviously we would need to have a lot of print machines patriotically churning out Monopoly money for this to be the answer.

But...that got me to thinking.  What about the game of Life?  That has money, and the bills have much larger values.  They’re more elaborate and look a lot more like real money, though if you look closely, you’ll notice that, like Monopoly money, there is no $ sign on the bills, and the bills are identified as “demand notes”, no “legal tender” or “In God We Trust” here.  Like Monopoly, the values on the game board are indicated with $ signs; the implication is that the value of the demand notes are equivalent to the $ needed.  In Monopoly the largest bank note is 500.  In the game of Life, 500 is the smallest demand note with other demand notes ranging from 1000 to as high as 100,000.  Now we’re getting somewhere!  The total value of all the demand notes in our Game of Life is 7,667,500, five hundred times the value of that included in a Monopoly game.  It would only take the equivalent of 4,695,142 Game of Life board games to reach thirty-six trillion in demand notes.  Considering that fifty million of the game have been sold, printing the money for another four and a half million sets should be easy.

Of course, all of this assumes that these demand notes would be accepted in lieu of U.S. dollars.  Even though the dollar won’t be worth much once the country goes bankrupt, most will likely still insist on payment with good ole greenbacks.  I guess the younger generation prefers to use credit cards and direct bank transfers rather than cash, so the concept of money is reduced to the electronic transfer of figures on credit card receipts and bank statements.  But for those of us who still like to use cash, when the crash arrives, we will likely be burdened with hyperinflation and forced to carry our money around in wheelbarrows like they did in Germany in the early 1920’s.   To avoid that, maybe Treasury could start printing larger bills.  The largest bill currently in circulation is the $100 bill, has been since 1969.  The largest bill ever printed in the U.S. (but never in circulation) was the $100,000 gold certificate.  Ironically, it was printed during the Great Depression when no one had much money and some were asking “Buddy, could you spare a dime?”  Imagine stopping at your favorite fast food joint and asking if they could break a $100,000 bill!   Maybe we should plan ahead and start printing some gold certificates.  We could start by printing $500 and $1,000 bills, easing our way up to bills of $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, and $100,000 like they have in the Game of Life.  In 1920’s Germany bills were printed with an ever-increasing number of zeroes.  Bills as large as 50 trillion marks were printed (sounds like a lot but by then the exchange rate was about 4 trillion marks to the dollar, so 50 trillion was only worth about $12.50, enough to buy a Combo Meal).  With a face value of $50,000,000,000,000, there would barely be enough room on the bill to print the entire number.  Might have to resort to $50 x 10¹² to fit it on the bill.  Hopefully it won’t come to that, but we need to be prepared.

Maybe the younger generation has it right.  No bills at all.  After all, the mints quit stamping pennies.  If all money transfers were the electronic transfer of numbers from one account to another, we could eliminate everything the government is stamping or printing.  I suppose it would make the transition from $100 to $50,000,000,000,000 a lot smoother.  Still, there is something about having a crisp $100 bill in your wallet.  Can’t imagine how great it would feel to have a $50,000,000,000,000 bill in my money clip even if it could only buy a burger, fries, and a drink.