"the updated $20 bill isn't expected to be issued until 2030 at the earliest, according to a report from CNN; citing the lengthy approval process by the Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence steering committee"
14 years is an impressive amount of red tape. There are kids today who have yet to enter school and will be high school graduates before this change makes it through committee.
At some point you have to wonder how much of a service the ACD committee is providing vs. how much they're justifying their paychecks.
I doubt it's just red tape. More likely there is invested capital that has to be EOL, and they wrap up all the changes across the stack in one place. Counterfeiting is sexy, so it's the excuse. But really it's a calculation based on depreciation and lifecycle management.
Seems like a bit of a losing game to try to fight counterfeiters on a 15+ year cycle. Who knows what home printing technology will look like in 10 years? Even 5 years from now is hazy. It's already the case that home laser printers can make some very convincing forgeries if you can track down a reasonably similar type of paper and defeat the currency detection firmware.
Seriously, how does it take 14 years to verify a design and protect it against counterfeit? SpaceX sent vehicles into space and landed them back here on earth on a moving drone platform in the middle of the Atlantic in less time.
10 years of it could just be resting on laurels. If the current design resists counterfeiting well enough, there's not much justification for making a new one yet.
I'm not saying that's the explanation, just speculating.
You have to think about all the advances that will be made in counterfeit methodologies and technologies in the next 14 years and think that whatever they approve will be outdated in 14 years.
Am I the only one who finds trading the image of a former slave for goods and services to be in slightly poor taste? There's no question Harriet Tubman was a great lady, but I'm not sure this is the best way to honor her.
He's flipping your "bad taste" question back on you. Jefferson and Jackson have been on currency for decades and in their time treated people as currency and no one blinked.
I understand on "the Native American problem" he was faced with an untenable status quo and even worse ideas from the states in question. However, solving it by negotiating with largely unrecognized leaders, then forcibly relocating ethnic populations across the country in exchange for dubious reimbursement for their native and sovereign land doesn't exactly seem a moral solution.
It certainly could have gone worse had the states had their ways, but his solution wasn't exactly a paragon of ethical behavior.
Then how about Marie Therese Metoyer? She started life as a slave, but ended up owning her own plantation. She was eventually able to buy all of her children out of slavery. According to church records, she owned 12 slaves at the time of her death, but local tradition has it that she was freeing them as well. It's also established that she ran her plantation with no slaves and only help from her sons for many years.
So she's a former slave, a liberator of slaves, and a plantation owner and owner of slaves all in one. Would having her on a bill be in poor taste? (Granted, there are probably more prominent persons who should be on a bill before her.)
No. You shouldn't view her just as a 'former slave'. She risked her life to help destroy slavery. Characterizing her in such a binary way is short-sighted, I think.
You should view her as an American hero and this is one way to honor our heroes. What I find in poor taste is that we haven't honored her in some equivalent fashion until now. The Tubman museum in Georgia is pretty great though. There's a statue in Maryland too. Outside of that, on a national level, I'm not sure what we've done.
By that logic we should never put image of a woman on a bill because exchanging it for goods and services will be akin to prostitution. Makes no sense.
And anyway after the 30 picoseconds of novelty the people will only look at the numerical value and just ignore that there is a human there. And by the time it enters circulation we will be in cashless dystopia.
Why? Because it feels like you're trading the woman herself for goods and services? A review of Magritte's "The Treachery of Images" should assuage that concern, I imagine :)
Shopkeeper: I'm sorry, I can't accept this bill as legal tender. It doesn't say that it's not legal tender—ergo it is legal tender, ergo it's not legal tender.
I find all representations of identifiable historic individuals to be in poor taste.
I liked it when Liberty herself was featured on the coinage. I'd vastly prefer it if the currency denominations featured various depictions of Industry, Agriculture, Liberty, Justice, and Science/Truth rather than politicians and/or revised and sanitized historic figures. The other side can feature economically significant animals.
Besides that, the money portraits seem a lot like icons of the Americanist pseudoreligion (as satirized to great effect in Bioshock Infinite), and a betrayal of the idea that the US is a nation of laws, not men.
For instance, a Saturn V rocket is a suitable subject for a money engraving. A portrait of Neil Armstrong is not. A Model T is an acceptable subject. Henry Ford is not. A Texas oilfield is suitable. John D. Rockefeller is not. A railway locomotive is okay. Cornelius Vanderbilt is not. The light bulb is acceptable; Thomas Edison is not. A harvester in a productive wheat field is acceptable. The politician that penned the farm bill is not. Blindfolded Justice, with scales in one hand, and sword and laurels in the other, would be great. John Jay would not be.
Real people all come with baggage. Ideals are clean.
Just another example of social engineering, brainwashing, and the pushing of an agenda on the American people. This is not to sound misogynist, but they are putting this woman on the 20$ bill, just for the sake of it.
Here is a recent quote by Barack Obama where he lieterally says "women are smarter than men":
"That includes, by the way, working through some of the structural biases that exist in science. Some of them -- a lot of them are unconscious. But the fact is, is that we've got to get more of our young women and minorities into science and technology, engineering and math, and computer science. I’ve been really pleased to see the number of young women who have gotten more and more involved in our science fairs over the course of these last several years.
And as I said to a group that I had a chance to meet with outside, we're not going to succeed if we got half the team on the bench, especially when it’s the smarter half of the team."
The leftist means of putting men down, especially in a time when 60% of all college students are women is alarming. Again, this is not to say that women have not been disenfranchised, they have, but the pendulum is swinging too far the other way and will not bode well for society.
If feminism truly is about egalnatism as I am told repeatedly then that joke should offend feminists should it not? If men were the other half of the team would the same joke be acceptable?
Harriet Tubman is of commensurate historical importance to Andrew Jackson -- who also comes with the unfortunate baggage of his policy of removal of Native Americans.
Technically, that was a cupronickel dollar and a brass dollar. The last woman on the obverse of an actual silver dollar was Liberty. The first woman on a US silver dollar was Liberty. She was the only "person" on the coin from 1794 all the way to 1935. The current non-circulating silver bullion coin also features Liberty.
Eisenhower was on a cupronickel dollar from 1971 to 1978. SB Anthony was on from 1979-1981 and 1999.
The brass coins have had Sacagawea since 2000, and George Washington from 2007 to 2016.
In total, Liberty has been minted on circulated US coinage for 142 years. Eisenhower was on for 8 years. Washington was on for 10, and barely circulated at all. Anthony was on for 4 years, Sacagawea for 17.
Liberty was also on a $20 US note (greenback) from 1862 to 1863.
Clearly, the US Mint has a better history of sexual equality than either the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, the latter only ever depicting presidents, secretaries of the Treasury, and Ben Franklin.
But why are US Presidents and Benjamin Franklins on the notes, rather than just former Treasury secretaries?
Clearly, if you can choose to put someone that really has nothing to do with the issuance of fiat currency on the notes, you could put anyone on them, and anyone includes women.
I suppose it was also due to circumstances beyond their control that Benjamin Franklin was not a woman?
I don't really care. I find the whole business to be slightly off-putting to begin with, and this is just a reminder that other people control all the money we use. But this is the turd you step in when you choose to honor specific individuals on your notes, rather than sticking to the eidolons. By putting specific people on the money, you are implicitly saying that everyone else was not good enough to make the cut.
Putting Tubman on the $20 just seems an awful lot like Mitt Romney showing off a token black friend at a campaign event, or thumping on one of his "binders full of women". They're not fooling anyone. We know they're still hard at work, desperately trying to sell the post-2008 "recovery" that only ever seems to show up on paper, but not in paychecks. This is a sideshow--a distraction.
Can we maybe get some money without the blatant political manipulation? Crap like this is the only reason I have any interest in Bitcoin (et al.) at all. We are all simply dying to have a currency that is immune to at least one form of all the financial bullshittery that we have traditionally been subjected to.
Who is honored by cryptocoins? Satoshi, but no one knows who he really is. Doge--a meme dog. Kanye West, in what appears to be a satire of some sort, though this may be covered by Poe's Law.
Just another example of social engineering, brainwashing, and the pushing of an agenda on the American people.
Commensurate accusations for the time were leveled against Andrew Jackson.
The leftist means of putting men down
I don't feel put down. An inaccurate positive stereotype is, in the end, just as damaging as a negative one, though. How is "women are smarter" any better than "asians are better at math?" It's not.
Right, but take this in aggregate. Take it with divorce laws, employment quotas, commercials where the wife always puts the husband down, college graduation rates between men and women...
Cultural overcompensation worked out so well in the 60's, so why not do it some more? But really, that stuff is just surface. The real problems are systemic and economic. Gender politics is being used to pit disenfranchised angry young women against disenfranchised angry young men. The outraged masses can be rallied to vote and demonstrate, and at the same time, their energy is directed away from the underlying problems.
I really like Andrew Jackson, it's too bad he's going instead of Hamilton.
Can't believe they want to take Lincoln off the 5$ bill though. Why can't we just add new denominations of currency into the system? Bring back the 500$/1000$/5000$/10000$ bills? Perhaps instead add a 25$ bill and a 200$/250$ bill?
Only terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers use large denomination bills. Ordinary people have no use of paying big sums anonymously. Or the wages to make obtaining such sums possible. /sarcasm
There was some whining recently that 500 Euro was just too big of a banknote. i generally support the ability of citizens to do financial transactions anonymously. We have more than enough ways to track everything else.
I hate Andrew Jackson, and it's too bad he's going instead of Hamilton. I'd be all for replacing every statue of Jackson across the nation with, say, Tubman, but the one place where Jackson should stay is the money: it was long a snide reminder that if the central bank gets too out of hand in shoveling money into the faces of the wealthy at the expense of the people, a populist president could rise and take them down.
It's rather telling that we are going to lose this symbolism.
I would be for erecting a giant statue of Jackson in front of the federal reserve building in dc.
I'm glad you asked. The history of the 1824 & 1828 presidential election is really interesting.
The first four U.S. Presidents were founding fathers, so the election of 1824 was the first time it was a completely different generation vying for what direction we should take the country in. John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams, seemed like he fit the bill. He was secretary of state, and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all had served as Secretary of State before taking the mantel.
Andrew Jackson was cut from a different cloth as the first five presidents. Not wealthy/educated/elite/eastern, Andrew Jackson instead was a frontiers man and a war hero.
By the time the votes were tallies, Jackson won the popular vote, but since the race was split between more than two candidates and he only had a plurality but not a majority (more votes than anyone else, but less than 50%), congress got to decide the next President.
In a move of backroom bargaining, John Q. Adams offers the then speaker of the house Henry Clay a position as the 9th Secretary of State in exchange for whipping the votes. It worked.
Screwed out of an election that should have been his, Andrew Jackson held his tongue and his temper and instead looked towards the next election where he knocked the sitting president out of office.
Who are your favorite founding fathers of the U.S.A.?
hahaha touché. I was kinda peeved someone asked me on what grounds I like something (what grounds are needed, we like what we like?) and I thought the best way to turn that around was to ask GFK about what they like (-:
For me, Jackson is in a weird place between "effective president" and "bad person". Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower all seem like more deserving presidents.
I'm a big political hack currently, I've been watching CNN's Race for the White House and taking a lot of more political history courses (HSTAA 212 U.S. Military History, etc).
I certainly don't agree with the direction a lot of these guy's moral compasses were pointing in, but boy did sure did get things done (most of the time).
I hold Teddy and Eisenhower in high esteem, but need to read up more about Monroe.
Monroe is a like a defanged version of Jackson. Equally impactful to the shape of the country (though less on the contours of our politics than Jackson), but with a healthy ambivalence towards slavery and less genocide.
Adding $25 USD bills would break the greedy choice property for making change. Making $40 in change using a greedy strategy would mean selecting a 25, a 10, and a 5, while the optimal choice is to select two 20s.
It would be fewer bills than without the $25, but the greedy strategy would still work for both (without, you'd get 3 bills: $20, $20, $10, and that's the optimal). Whereas change for $40, the greedy strategy will give you 3 bills: $25, $10, $5—which is more than the optimal 2 bills.
It's not about comparing the number of bills vs. each other—it's not surprising that adding an additional denomination lets you make change in fewer bills. It's about whether the greedy algorithm for making change gets you the optimum number. Currently it does, but if you add a $25 bill, it would not.
Lincoln is still on the $5. They're just updating the reverse. Per the official announcement by Sec. Lew:
The reverse of the new $5 will depict the historic events that have occurred at the Lincoln Memorial. In 1939, at a time when Washington’s concert halls were still segregated, world-renowned Opera singer Marian Anderson helped advance civil rights when, with the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she performed at the Lincoln Memorial in front of 75,000 people. And in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the same monument in front of hundreds of thousands. Honoring these figures will bring to life events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy. The front of the new $5 will continue to feature President Lincoln.
Maybe in 150 years they'll put Edward Snowden — or a similar activist — on a bill. It tends to take people a century or two to recognize the value of contributions made by these type of people.
Ugh. I frankly don't like the idea of having people on the bills at all. I'd love to see just distinct abstract shapes.
I was also going to make a dig at them for changing purely superficial characteristics before actually creating accessible money for the blind, but apparently starting in 2019 there will be tactile features introduced, so, I guess they put me in my place! Good on them.
Interesting choice of Tubman. Is she the most important woman in American history? I don't know that much about her, I'll read up on Wikipedia later today.
Why can't we just put great american's on our money vs trying to shoehorn someone just because of their gender. Our currency should be a celebration of great people regardless. I understand Tubman's contributions to a very dark time in our history but I think if we were to celebrate equality, Susan B Anthony would be a better choice.
FDR would be the biggest missing person on our currency in my opinion.
77 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadAt some point you have to wonder how much of a service the ACD committee is providing vs. how much they're justifying their paychecks.
I'm not saying that's the explanation, just speculating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery
I understand on "the Native American problem" he was faced with an untenable status quo and even worse ideas from the states in question. However, solving it by negotiating with largely unrecognized leaders, then forcibly relocating ethnic populations across the country in exchange for dubious reimbursement for their native and sovereign land doesn't exactly seem a moral solution.
It certainly could have gone worse had the states had their ways, but his solution wasn't exactly a paragon of ethical behavior.
So she's a former slave, a liberator of slaves, and a plantation owner and owner of slaves all in one. Would having her on a bill be in poor taste? (Granted, there are probably more prominent persons who should be on a bill before her.)
(I once dated one of her descendants.)
You should view her as an American hero and this is one way to honor our heroes. What I find in poor taste is that we haven't honored her in some equivalent fashion until now. The Tubman museum in Georgia is pretty great though. There's a statue in Maryland too. Outside of that, on a national level, I'm not sure what we've done.
And anyway after the 30 picoseconds of novelty the people will only look at the numerical value and just ignore that there is a human there. And by the time it enters circulation we will be in cashless dystopia.
Shopkeeper: I'm sorry, I can't accept this bill as legal tender. It doesn't say that it's not legal tender—ergo it is legal tender, ergo it's not legal tender.
I liked it when Liberty herself was featured on the coinage. I'd vastly prefer it if the currency denominations featured various depictions of Industry, Agriculture, Liberty, Justice, and Science/Truth rather than politicians and/or revised and sanitized historic figures. The other side can feature economically significant animals.
Besides that, the money portraits seem a lot like icons of the Americanist pseudoreligion (as satirized to great effect in Bioshock Infinite), and a betrayal of the idea that the US is a nation of laws, not men.
For instance, a Saturn V rocket is a suitable subject for a money engraving. A portrait of Neil Armstrong is not. A Model T is an acceptable subject. Henry Ford is not. A Texas oilfield is suitable. John D. Rockefeller is not. A railway locomotive is okay. Cornelius Vanderbilt is not. The light bulb is acceptable; Thomas Edison is not. A harvester in a productive wheat field is acceptable. The politician that penned the farm bill is not. Blindfolded Justice, with scales in one hand, and sword and laurels in the other, would be great. John Jay would not be.
Real people all come with baggage. Ideals are clean.
I'd also love to see Chicago Pile-1 (first supercritical fission reactor) at Stagg Field on money.
Here is a recent quote by Barack Obama where he lieterally says "women are smarter than men":
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/13/remar...
"That includes, by the way, working through some of the structural biases that exist in science. Some of them -- a lot of them are unconscious. But the fact is, is that we've got to get more of our young women and minorities into science and technology, engineering and math, and computer science. I’ve been really pleased to see the number of young women who have gotten more and more involved in our science fairs over the course of these last several years.
And as I said to a group that I had a chance to meet with outside, we're not going to succeed if we got half the team on the bench, especially when it’s the smarter half of the team."
The leftist means of putting men down, especially in a time when 60% of all college students are women is alarming. Again, this is not to say that women have not been disenfranchised, they have, but the pendulum is swinging too far the other way and will not bode well for society.
>...we're not going to succeed if we got half the team on the bench, especially when it’s the smarter half of the team. (Laughter.)
Sounds like it was a joke. I think you're being a bit oversensitive.
Eisenhower was on a cupronickel dollar from 1971 to 1978. SB Anthony was on from 1979-1981 and 1999.
The brass coins have had Sacagawea since 2000, and George Washington from 2007 to 2016.
In total, Liberty has been minted on circulated US coinage for 142 years. Eisenhower was on for 8 years. Washington was on for 10, and barely circulated at all. Anthony was on for 4 years, Sacagawea for 17.
Liberty was also on a $20 US note (greenback) from 1862 to 1863.
Clearly, the US Mint has a better history of sexual equality than either the Treasury or the Federal Reserve, the latter only ever depicting presidents, secretaries of the Treasury, and Ben Franklin.
Clearly, if you can choose to put someone that really has nothing to do with the issuance of fiat currency on the notes, you could put anyone on them, and anyone includes women.
I don't really care. I find the whole business to be slightly off-putting to begin with, and this is just a reminder that other people control all the money we use. But this is the turd you step in when you choose to honor specific individuals on your notes, rather than sticking to the eidolons. By putting specific people on the money, you are implicitly saying that everyone else was not good enough to make the cut.
Putting Tubman on the $20 just seems an awful lot like Mitt Romney showing off a token black friend at a campaign event, or thumping on one of his "binders full of women". They're not fooling anyone. We know they're still hard at work, desperately trying to sell the post-2008 "recovery" that only ever seems to show up on paper, but not in paychecks. This is a sideshow--a distraction.
Can we maybe get some money without the blatant political manipulation? Crap like this is the only reason I have any interest in Bitcoin (et al.) at all. We are all simply dying to have a currency that is immune to at least one form of all the financial bullshittery that we have traditionally been subjected to.
Who is honored by cryptocoins? Satoshi, but no one knows who he really is. Doge--a meme dog. Kanye West, in what appears to be a satire of some sort, though this may be covered by Poe's Law.
Commensurate accusations for the time were leveled against Andrew Jackson.
The leftist means of putting men down
I don't feel put down. An inaccurate positive stereotype is, in the end, just as damaging as a negative one, though. How is "women are smarter" any better than "asians are better at math?" It's not.
Can't believe they want to take Lincoln off the 5$ bill though. Why can't we just add new denominations of currency into the system? Bring back the 500$/1000$/5000$/10000$ bills? Perhaps instead add a 25$ bill and a 200$/250$ bill?
Only terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers use large denomination bills. Ordinary people have no use of paying big sums anonymously. Or the wages to make obtaining such sums possible. /sarcasm
There was some whining recently that 500 Euro was just too big of a banknote. i generally support the ability of citizens to do financial transactions anonymously. We have more than enough ways to track everything else.
It's rather telling that we are going to lose this symbolism.
I would be for erecting a giant statue of Jackson in front of the federal reserve building in dc.
On what grounds.
The first four U.S. Presidents were founding fathers, so the election of 1824 was the first time it was a completely different generation vying for what direction we should take the country in. John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams, seemed like he fit the bill. He was secretary of state, and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all had served as Secretary of State before taking the mantel.
Andrew Jackson was cut from a different cloth as the first five presidents. Not wealthy/educated/elite/eastern, Andrew Jackson instead was a frontiers man and a war hero.
By the time the votes were tallies, Jackson won the popular vote, but since the race was split between more than two candidates and he only had a plurality but not a majority (more votes than anyone else, but less than 50%), congress got to decide the next President.
In a move of backroom bargaining, John Q. Adams offers the then speaker of the house Henry Clay a position as the 9th Secretary of State in exchange for whipping the votes. It worked.
Screwed out of an election that should have been his, Andrew Jackson held his tongue and his temper and instead looked towards the next election where he knocked the sitting president out of office.
Who are your favorite founding fathers of the U.S.A.?
I certainly don't agree with the direction a lot of these guy's moral compasses were pointing in, but boy did sure did get things done (most of the time).
I hold Teddy and Eisenhower in high esteem, but need to read up more about Monroe.
Currently:
$40: greedy: $20, $20
$50: Including a $25 bill:$40:
$50:The reverse of the new $5 will depict the historic events that have occurred at the Lincoln Memorial. In 1939, at a time when Washington’s concert halls were still segregated, world-renowned Opera singer Marian Anderson helped advance civil rights when, with the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she performed at the Lincoln Memorial in front of 75,000 people. And in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the same monument in front of hundreds of thousands. Honoring these figures will bring to life events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy. The front of the new $5 will continue to feature President Lincoln.
There is a practical reason not to do this btw. Bills of this size get used for criminal purposes.
Lawrence Summers had a recent OpEd in The Post calling for the elimination of the $100 for this reason. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/16/its-t...
I was also going to make a dig at them for changing purely superficial characteristics before actually creating accessible money for the blind, but apparently starting in 2019 there will be tactile features introduced, so, I guess they put me in my place! Good on them.
FDR would be the biggest missing person on our currency in my opinion.