Why? Seems like a lotta work for not much benefit.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
7 points (100.0% liked)
Personal Finance
67 readers
2 users here now
Learn about budgeting, saving, getting out of debt, credit, investing, and retirement planning. Join our community, read the PF Wiki, and get on top of your finances!
Note: This community is not region centric, so if you are posting anything specific to a certain region, kindly specify that in the title (something like [USA], [EU], [AUS] etc.)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because numbers are becoming so large its almost pointless to think about. The national debt for example is 33 trillion dollars. That is an unimaginable sum. What even is 33 trillion dollars?
Is this a problem, though? There's currencies like the Yen which have high numbers, the users just adjust their mindset of how much is "a lot". Reducing the numbers wouldn't change the problems of things getting more expensive. This feels like treating a very cosmetic symptom of a much larger problem.
The wealthy would still possess an obscene and unfathomable amount of wealth and the impoverished would still be struggling to get by, just the numbers would be smaller. Does that help anything?
Oh, I definitely see your point, and it is very much a psychological thing more than an actual fix.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be paying $266 in rent, though if I'm making one third of what I do now, I'm still in the same spot, just... with smaller numbers.
Right, as I said, it is definitely more psychological than actually helpful, but it would definitely feel a lot better to see smaller numbers. Hell, the national debt is even hard to write. 33,000,000,000,000
But the national debt is irrelevant to me. It has zero impact on my day to day life. It's just some imaginary number pundits can shout about to push their utterly disconnected agendas.
Even if I could wrap my head around it, that wouldn't improve the credit rating of the nation, even if I could manage to care one iota about that.
I'm sorry, I'm just struggling to understand why it's useful to have a national debt that's a small enough number for me to visualize some quantification of it.
True, but as the national debt grows, everything else grows with it, and inflation, and eventually rent would be $10,000 a month.
Sorry, I don't think I follow as to why that's bad. If I pay, say, $1,000 in rent and earn $3,000 a month, it's the same thing as if I paid $10,000 in rent and made $30,000 a month.
While I can see how those numbers could be reduced into smaller numbers easily, I'm not sure I understand why that is beneficial. My material conditions don't change.
How does the national debt factor into that?
Primarily, just that the numbers are unnecessarily large and could be factored down to more manageable numbers.
That is an unimaginable sum. What even is 33 trillion dollars?
How is 11 trillion any better?
If you want to actually bring that to a number people can grasp than small amounts would become impractically small. Like you would need to deal with 0.000001 and 0.0000001 dollars and stuff.
I don't really see a point in doing that. I dislike coins.
I dislike coins too, but mostly because a dollar is the smallest useful denomination and anything below is rounding. In a 1900 era world where you could buy something material for a nickel or dime, it was worthwhile to use those coins.
In the Eurozone, you have 1 and 2 Euro coins, which are super useful all the time for small purchases. I'd really love to see them here too.
But why do you dislike them? Because in this event a coin would actually be worth using, where now it's just an annoyance.
Does anybody like decimals? Even if you add more worth it's more math.
I kind of like how the Yen is denominated: all prices are integers. It would be roughly equivalent to pricing everything in cents, but at least there'd be no decimals.
That's true. Have a look at Bitcoin where they are sending satoshis around (0.00000001).
No. Costs rise all the time. Ideally, so does your income, giving you mostly the same purchasing power as before - just because 10 is a larger number than the 8 you paid a year or two ago, doesn't mean you realistically expended more value (e.g. time spent working, or foregoing other things).
Rejiggering this would involve a lot of work. It would not give you any more or less value, it would be cosmetic. It would also be based on a very subjective "this shouldn't cost as much as $X" where both X and the rough value of the $ are... just something you happen to be used to. A trivial example is how this looks to anyone with a different currency, or to an American in a different time.
Now, of course, a large amount of people in the entire Western world have gotten shafted for 50 years plus, and the purchasing power has gotten even worse in the past 5, but that's basically a separate issue.
(Also, coins are pretty expensive compared to paper money, IIRC)
Yeah, incomes have risen a hell of a lot slower than inflation causing the average person to be poorer overall. Redominating the currency would not fix that problem. That is a systemic issue where inflation is higher than wage increases, so people demand higher wages, which then causes inflation to increase, and it's a spiral.
I don't think that would work out in the way you think it would. Also, this isn't really personal finance.