Excellent assessment!
While you’re at it, let’s also lop two zeroes off of our currency and get the numbers back to a lower range that was more meaningful. Inflation has really clobbered our coins and bills. The problem with doing that is you can’t recycle old coins or the old currency. You need to call it the “New Dollar” and give a deadline for everybody to turn in their old dollars for the New Dollar.
When I was a kid, we got 2¢ for a recyclable milk bottle and we thought we were rich!
You’re probably right. We need to have real metals with real value in our coins (incredibly, the metal in pennies is worth more than its value, even after they went to zinc). They pretty much did away with that beginning in 1965 (curiously, the point at which our country started going down the toilet to the present day).
Gold is too expensive at present. I think if we can make the argument for it, going back on the gold standard might be worth pursuing. I’m not an economist, so I can’t claim to be an expert on the subject.
I was a huge numismatist when I was a kid, still have a minor interest in it. Just observing that so much of our coinage is so boring and almost banal. Excluding the dollar coin, which hasn’t really been popularly used since before 1965, it’s now been an unprecedented 56 years since there has been a change (excluding minor design tweaks to the existing portraits) on the coinage.