Hamilton to stay on $10; Tubman replacing Jackson | Hacker News Reader

Hamilton to stay on $10; Tubman replacing Jackson

politico.com

52 pointsbaehaus74 comments

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?

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.

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.

what about change for 50?

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.

change of 50 in two bills and change of 40 in three, is less optimal than change of 50 in three and 40 in two?

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.

Currently:

$40: greedy: $20, $20

  optimal: $20, $20

  is greedy optimal: Yes

$50:

  greedy: $20, $20, $10

  optimal: $20, $20, $10

  is greedy optimal: Yes

Including a $25 bill:

$40:

  greedy: $25, $10, $5

  optimal: $20, $20

  is greedy optimal: No

$50:

  greedy: $25, $25

  optimal: $25, $25

  is greedy optimal: Yes

Given that we don't have $40 bills, I'm not sure this is a problem.

Or just have lots of designs like euros.

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.

> Bring back the 500$/1000$/5000$/10000$ bills?

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...

So do $1s and $5s and $10s.

> I really like Andrew Jackson

On what grounds.

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.?

Jackson wasn't a founder, so that last question is a little odd.

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.

>Bring back the 500$/1000$/5000$/10000$ bills?

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 had a currency exchanger claim that the largest bill I could get had a value of around $15 USD and that they did not deal in high value notes.

"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.

According the actual Treasury site: "We anticipate the new redesigned $10 note to enter circulation after 2020."

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.

Do you want to pay more taxes to upgrade something utilitarian for purely aesthetic reasons?

Or you know, the 12 years from Sputnik to Apollo 11...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I heartily applaud the idea of a bill bearing the image of a Saturn V rocket.

We did get the moon landing on the reverse of an Eisenhower cupronickel dollar coin, so there is precedent for Apollo on money.

I'd also love to see Chicago Pile-1 (first supercritical fission reactor) at Stagg Field on money.

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 :)

We need a new bill for the post-modern era, bearing an image with the inscription "This is not legal tender".

[In the future]

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.

There's no question that Kackson was a good President, but isn't trading the image of a lifelong slaveholder for goods and services in poor taste?

There's no question?

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.)

(I once dated one of her descendants.)

I didn't say we should keep Jackson....

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_slavery

Try asking a Cherokee if Jackson was a good president.

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 equate only women with sex work?

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.

You seriously think we'll still have bills in 150 years?

I hope so, or something similarly anonymous.

Secretary of the Treasury has an official announcement on Medium: https://medium.com/@USTreasury/an-open-letter-from-secretary...

My vote is to put Sally Ride on the $20 bill.

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.

It's all about the Tubmans baby.

Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/20/11469320/harriet-tubman-wi..., which points to this.

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.

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