Selling Money — An Alternative to Taxes
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
Celebrating the British Open and the retirement of Jack Nicklaus, the Bank of Scotland issued five-pound notes with a photo of Nicklaus. Tourists, collectors, and golf fans rushed to buy them.
Also, the US Post Office (through stamps.com) let’s you, for a premium price, design your own officially-approved postage stamps, for instance, with photos of your kids.
Congress should consider selling by auction the images that appear on US currency, as an alternative way to raise revenue and reduce taxes.
They could start with pennies. It now costs one and half cents to mint a penny. In other words, the government loses money making pennies, and it’s likely that pennies will be eliminated soon. As an alternative, the government could sell advertising, putting a company logo and/or the image of a billionaire on pennies, instead of Lincoln and the Lincoln Memorial. From there, the project could be expanded to include all coins and paper currency as well.
Imagine an annual on-line auction for each denomination. Imagine all the wealthy people who might want to see their picture on the $1 bill and might be willing to pay millions for that honor.
Corporations already pay tens of millions of dollars for the naming rights to the stadiums of professional sports teams. How much more might they be willing to spend to have their corporate logo and tag line on US currency? Or imagine fans of a rock star or movie/TV star or supermodel or sports hero willing to do class-action bidding for the image of the personality of their choice — combining millions of small bids automatically online, like voting for baseball all-stars or for winners of American Idol.
If you could raise billions of dollars that way, every year, why not? And as a result, the currency itself could become stronger in foreign markets than it is today, simply from collectors taking millions of dollars in bills out of circulation.
And if that project works, why not put advertising on military uniforms, tanks, planes, as well as on government buildings and historic monuments. Then we would be well on our way to free-enterprise, tax-free Nirvana. Hallelujah!
