Chapter 4 MONEY All the known gold in the world would make a smaller pile than four cords of firewood. The pile of all the gold so far mined or discovered would be less than 8 feet tall by 8 feet wide and 8 feet deep. The pile would weigh 97,000 tons. Twenty-four-karat gold has some copper mixed into it. If it didn't it would be so soft you could change the shape of coins and jewelry with your bare hands. How much cash is there in America? There is about $823 in circulation for each of us. The Federal Reserve offers a free service. If you have cash that has been burned, torn or otherwise destroyed, they will help you verify and replace that money. They once recieved a shotgun where a man had hidden some money, but forgot and fired the gun. In another case, a farmer sent his cow's stomach to them, all stuffed with money. It costs 2.5 cents to make a $1 or a $100 bill. A few years ago, a new coin was introduced, the Susan B. Anthony dollar. People didn't like them because they were easy to mix up with quarters, since they were about the same size and color. At the Federal Reserve is a locker that contains 334 million Susan B. Anthony dollars. Real dollar bills have little red and blue fibers mixed into the paper. You can quickly spot most counterfeits because they do not have these fibers. The paper U.S. money is printed on is not paper at all, but cloth: 3/4 cotton and 1/4 linen. One time the Federal Reserve accidentally printed bills worth $5 on the front, but with $1 backs. Inspectors caught the mistake before they were circulated. The United States Secret Service was originated in 1865 to combat counterfeit money. There was a time when as much as one third of all the money in America was counterfeit. The Philadelphia mint produces 26 million pennies per day. In 1989, Americans spent an average of $5580.25 per family on Christmas gifts. Americans send three billion Christmas cards a year. If you have the average number of friends, you should get at least 12 cards a year. How many do you get? The average American spends 148 hours per year waiting in lines. If you could be paid minimum wage for those 3-1/2 work weeks, you would get $498.80. If a man could be paid minimum wage for shaving, he would earn $11,222.50 in a lifetime, working 3,350 hours. If the average housewife were paid one penny for every step she takes as she works around the house, she would make $64,240 per year. The people who work in the Interior Decorating Department of Sears have to write a customer's name in 67 different places for a job which can sell for as little as $300 installed. Fifty-two percent of women have jobs. Ninety percent of these women are between 20 and 30 years old. One out of every four women fail in business. Four out of every five men fail in business. In the past decade, the number of women in business for themselves has doubled. Over half of the millionaires in America are women. (50.4 percent) One out of every 300 Americans is a millionaire. There are 157 billionaires. One out of every 48 million people in the world is a billionaire. The wealthiest man in the world is the Sultan of Brunei, who, it is estimated, has $35 billion dollars. How much is a million dollars? Since a dollar bill is 0.004375" thick, a million dollars in crisp new one dollar bills stacked sideways would be a bit longer than a football field. If you laid 1 million one-dollar bills end to end, it would take you 31 hours to walk to the end of the line. Parker Brothers have printed more money for their Monopoly games than the Federal Reserve has issued in real money for America. If you stacked up all the Monopoly sets they have made, the pile would be over 1100 miles tall. A mile of pennies laid out is $844.80. By this standard, America is about $2.5 million wide from coast to coast. Since 1900, 90 billion pennies have been made in America. That is over 37000 for each American. Of course, there are not that many pennies now. Many billions have been lost or destroyed. There are some people who throw their pennies away. Workers at landfills and recycling plants report seeing thousands of pennies in the trash. The U.S. Treasury says that now 6 billion pennies are disappearing every year. Pennies are becoming useless, thanks to inflation. Many merchants find that paying employees to account for pennies costs more than the pennies are worth. Some stores have gone so far as to post signs saying they no longer accept pennies. Americans could probably lead normal lives if pennies were abolished. Pennies are now copper coated zinc. You can prove this by cutting a new penny in half. The older solid copper pennies are worth more for their metal than one cent each. Paper money is evolved from wealthy Europeans who used to have goldsmiths keep their gold, jewels and valuables in safes. The goldsmiths would issue receipts. Sometimes people would simply trade the receipts for goods or services, and the receipt's new owner could collect the gold. This saved the gold's owners from the necessity of visiting the goldsmith's shops to pay debts. Years ago, anyone with American paper money could trade it for genuine silver being held by the United States. 88.5 million Americans bought something mailorder in 1988. The average mailorder purchase was $74. In 1989, the average lawyer charged $118 per hour. It costs a restaurant twelve cents to serve you a glass of water. Americans spend $650 billion a year on medical attention. That averages out to $2,674.81 per person per year. The most expensive earphones are made by Sony for home stereo fanatics who have $4,000 to spend. A Sony employee says, "They're what people use when they want to hear what things really sound like." A check is merely an I.O.U., and I.O.U.'s can be written on anything. Someone once wrote a $15 check on an eggshell. The recipient took the eggshell to a bank in Canada, where it was cashed like any other check. In rural places today, you still find people who wear several hats. Here in Applegate, Oregon, the family that runs the post office also pumps gas, owns the general store and restaurant, and rents video tapes. George Green, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa was born in 1817 and died 63 years later. During that time he was the president of 6 banks, ten railroads, and three colleges, owned a hotel, newspaper, nursery and built steamboats, was a mayor and sat on the supreme court, and worked as a lawyer, teacher, and geologist. Have you ever wondered what the brand name Kodak means? The name Kodak, invented by George Eastman, means nothing. When he was looking for a good brand name, someone told him that the letter K made a nice sound that is easy to remember, and that five letters is a good name length. He took that advice. The total budget of the National Cancer Institute is about $4 per American. Are you looking for a career? Economists and futurists are saying the fastest growing job in America is going to be "information gardeners," officially called database managers. These will be people who use computers to collect, monitor and maintain vast pools of information. Already, most of the big companies in America would totally collapse if their computers suddenly went dead. There will be several levels of employment ranging from people with minimal education who just type information into the computers to the people who design the computers and the programs. The difference between graduating from high school with low grades and doing well in college would be either having a boring job as typist or being the chief programmer in charge of a database. In the 1950's 65 percent of the American workforce was blue-collar workers, the people who actually apply their hands to the work or product. Now the figure is about 17 percent. Some people have all the luck. Randy Halvorson's pool won the lottery in February 1988. He gets to share $3,400,000 with 13 other people in the pool. He took some of that money and bought more tickets. In January, 1990, he and his brother won and will be splitting an additional $7,200,000. There used to be an English coin shaped like a four-leaf clover. A person could break off one of the corners and use it as one-quarter the value of the whole coin. There is more than one million dollars belonging to Hitler and other Nazis still on deposit in American banks. Most of the people in the world have an average annual income under $200. The song, Happy Birthday to You, was written in 1936. Royalties are still paid to the estate of the authors, Mildred and Patty Hill. In the 1920's you could buy a brand new car for under $300. Between 1968 and 1978 the price of a new car went up drastically. They cost twice as much in 1978 as they did in 1968. The formula used in the toy, Silly Putty, was a failed attempt at making synthetic rubber. The company that makes Silly Putty was founded on a loan of $147. Today the company makes over 3 million Silly Putty eggs per year. They use a cement mixer to mix the ingredients and a taffy machine to slice it into little portions. The astronauts on Apollo 8 tried it for sticking tools to the walls so they wouldn't float away. Their's was supplied in a silver egg. Each episode of Miami Vice, the TV show, is budgeted at $1.4 million. The whole yearly budget of the real Miami Police Vice department is only $1.2 million. Some Expenditures You May Not Like The United States government spends over $16,000 per second, twenty four hours a day. The state of Arizona employes 120 "cactus cops," men whose jobs are to investigate the illegal transporting of big saguaro cacti. How effective are these investigators? They conducted 201 investigations last year which resulted in 70 convictions. That's less than two investigations per investigator per year. At the same time, in the same state, anyone who wants to develop land can legaly bulldoze over any cacti that are in the way. The United States Navy ordered a computerized bookkeeping system that was to have cost $33 million. As the project was being built the price climbed steadily higher. Finally, the price grew so high, the Navy gave up without completing the job. The Navy spent $230 million of our money and got absolutely nothing. In a similar case, the Internal Revenue Service spent $187 million just to decide if they should buy a $1.8 billion computerized tax return system. They decided no. A private audit of the waste of the United States government estimated internal waste at 4.2 billion dollars in 1988. This is money that is spend, but does not bring any results, whatsoever. That's $17.28 absolutely wasted from every man, woman and child in America. And in the average American home, someone gets yelled at if they leave a 10-cent-a-day light on. If you leave a 60 watt light on for 24 hours, and if your electricity costs about six cents per kilowatt/hour like it does here in southern Oregon, then that light will cost less than 10 cents. If you accidentally left it on for a whole month, the cost would still only be under $3.00. But there is a hidden cost. The power to run that light comes from a generating station is either a fossil fuel plant that pollutes the air or is nuclear, which might be risky. If you and thousands of other folks turned off unnecessary lights, we may be able to use less nuclear or fossil-fuel generating stations. "The President is a prisoner of the American manufacturers of armaments who control the White House." - Mikhail Gorbachev About six percent of the American GNP (Gross National Product) is spent on defense. In Russia, they spend 18 percent on defense. A typical aircraft carrier costs about $4-5 billion, about $80 from every family in America. Between 1965 and 1975, Howard Hughes cost the American taxpayers $1.7 million/year, a total of $6 billion. This was in the form of government contracts for military machines, etc. Howard Hughes never once attended a board of directors meeting, or any sort of meeting at any of the companies he owned. A pyramid similar to the ones in Egypt is being built in Indiana to attract tourists. Of the total cost of $3 million, $700,000 is U.S. taxpayers' money. This pyramid is only going to be 1/5th the size of the real thing. Taxpayers' money, in the amount of $121,000 was spent in a scientific study to find out why people say "ain't." In Los Angeles $203,979 of taxpayers' money was spent to help people lost on the freeways. Prisoners in Texas may have face-lifts, liposuction, any kind of plastic surgery they want at taxpayers expense. The United States Treasury Department has issued a report on the monetary value of tuxedos. It contains 54 pages. The only ones who read this report are the IRS. Taxes The IRS offers free advice, but thirty percent of the advice they give is wrong. If you fill out your forms incorrectly based on what they have told you, you are still responsible for the fines and penalties. The IRS has 120,000 employees. In 1987, 88 of these people were convicted of crimes such as accepting bribes or embezzlement. Before 1913 there was no income tax. In 1915 the average income in America was around $625 per year. In the year 1930 income tax was 1.5 percent for the first $7,500. The average American pays just over $1,000 per year in taxes. (This average includes non-workers and children.) The typical American works three hours per day just to pay taxes, and only gets to keep the money made during the other five hours of the work day. Another way of looking at this is that the first four and a half months of the year Americans work to pay their taxes, keeping only the money made after April 15th (income tax due day). If your income is less that $25,000, chances that the IRS will want to conduct an audit of your financial affairs are one in fifty-six. The IRS would need at least 15-3/4 miles of shelves to store the tax forms they receive each year.