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For decades, long predating the challenges of this particular moment, one of the biggest issues in politics has been an inability to dream big. It’s wild that a government-led effort put men on the moon in the ’60s; such a thing feels completely impossible today.
But I would even take that one step further: there is a remarkable lack of creativity in policymaking. Obviously issues like gun safety, immigration, and tax policy matter a ton, but there are other things that we can do to improve society too.
Here are three out-there but sensible policies that would make things better, in big ways and small. I hope this spurs you, and your representatives, to think more creatively than anyone in Washington, D.C. (or in Jefferson City) seems to be thinking.
1. The dollar should be denominated to one decimal place ($1.0), not two ($1.00)
You won’t hear me say “the Trump administration is right” very often, but they’re wise to get rid of the penny [ [link removed] ]. My only issue is that they’re not taking it far enough.
We shouldn’t even have theoretical pennies in transactions anymore, and the U.S. Dollar should only be denominated to the tenths place ($1.0), not to the hundredths place ($1.00).
A little bit of history: the U.S. dollar, technically, was denominated at one point to the thousandths place ($1.000), and the half-penny [ [link removed] ] was a coin that existed in the earliest days of the country. But the half-penny died with the Coinage Act of 1857 [ [link removed] ], because it was determined that the half-penny—which would be worth roughly 18¢ today [ [link removed] ]—had too little value [ [link removed] ].
It’s high time to simplify things even further with the U.S. dollar—we’re creating complexity and over-precision that’s neither wanted nor needed. Any transaction between $1.00 and $1.04 would round down to $1.0; any transaction between $1.05 and $1.09 would round up to $1.1.
What are the benefits?
Increased simplicity of transactions for vendors and customers.
The Mint would get to ditch money-losing pennies and nickels [ [link removed] ]. They’d only have to make two coins—dimes and half-dollars—which would simplify the scope of their work.
Nothing that I’m aware of costs less than 10¢ these days. Sooner or later, we’ll end up wanting to do this anyway.
Any concerns with this?
Would this increase costs to consumers? No, I don’t think so. First of all, because it’s well understood that pricing ending with a nine encourages people to buy more [ [link removed] ], I would argue that it’d actually end up saving a small amount of money, because retailers would start pricing at simply $0.9 rather than $0.99 to capture the same benefit. But even without that, the average American consumer transacts roughly 865 times per year [ [link removed] ]; over that many transactions, the rounding would generally net out.
Would this create technical or logistical hurdles for businesses? We don’t need to phase this in tomorrow; we can phase this in over a decade. It’s worth noting that the UK and Australia underwent a significantly more complicated process called decimalization [ [link removed] ] back in the ’60s and ’70s, without the help of computers and in a much shorter period of time, and they did just fine.
Plus, if we move to the one-decimal-point system, maybe we’ll get a delightfully wonderful video [ [link removed] ] like this one from Australia in the mid-’60s.
2. Price controls [ [link removed] ] are almost always bad. But there should be price caps on bottled water at stadiums built with any public funding
As I’ve written about before [ [link removed] ], even though public funding of stadiums is a bad use [ [link removed] ] of taxpayer money, it’s quite common. Let’s take the St. Louis Cardinals as an example.
The Cardinals got public funding when they first built the new Busch Stadium [ [link removed] ] in 2006. Now, with the stadium not yet 20 years old, they’re asking for more cash from taxpayers [ [link removed] ].
It’s certainly their right to try. But what strikes me as particularly obscene is to then use taxpayer-funded facilities to gouge people at games by charging them $6 for a water [ [link removed] ].
Look, charge whatever you want for beer. But I think any stadium that takes even a dime from taxpayers should be limited to charging $2 for bottled water.
At wholesale prices, a 20 oz. bottle of Dasani costs less than $2. Teams would still be making money; we’re not creating any hardship here.
The issue with price caps is that they artificially increase demand (which can lead to shortages in supply). On the supply side, they’re not going to run out of water—that’s not really applicable here. And when it comes to increased demand, I say: good! We all should probably be drinking more water, especially if it’s 90 degrees during a July day game [ [link removed] ] at Busch.
This is an easy concession to the taxpayers, who are paying for someone else’s glitzy new stadium. The very modest public health benefits are good too.
3. Teaching students about smallpox should be mandatory under state law
Vaccines and other medical advances that have drastically reduced mortality in children [ [link removed] ] are the greatest public health accomplishments in the history of the world. Of course, the two go hand-in-hand; infants who are unvaccinated are nearly twice as likely to die as children who are vaccinated [ [link removed] ].
Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an absolute quack, and although he’s responsible for some of the decline in the public’s faith in vaccines, his appointment to the Cabinet is also responsive to a larger—and deeply alarming—trend among the American public [ [link removed] ].
All of the controversy around the COVID-19 vaccine [ [link removed] ] didn’t help here. But some of this is a function of the fact that the people old enough to remember polio, smallpox, and other diseases are elderly or have already died. We’re a victim of our own success [ [link removed] ].
It’s important to help people understand how extraordinary the eradication of smallpox really was. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century [ [link removed] ]—many multiples more than every war in the 20th century combined, and the equivalent of nearly the entire U.S. population. But we’ve forgotten about smallpox alarmingly fast; I don’t remember learning much about it in school.
So what can we do about this?
We should push for states to mandate education on smallpox and its eradication. This really shouldn’t be controversial; I’ve never seen any claim, even from staunch anti-vaccine nuts, that the smallpox vaccine was a bad thing. Photos of smallpox victims [ [link removed] ] speak for themselves.
Local science centers and museums should devote more energy to the history of infectious diseases. As far as I can tell, there are no museums dedicated to smallpox specifically. In a period where childhood diseases are no longer common, this feels as important now as it’s ever been.
Remembering a phenomenon that killed 300 million people in the 20th century feels important on its own merits. Understanding the miracle of the smallpox vaccine is a worthy goal too—and something that’s obviously lost on far too many Americans today.
From the smallpox vaccine, people can extrapolate however they’d like as they think about hesitancy towards today’s vaccines.
Dream bigger and more creatively
Just because people haven’t discussed certain ideas doesn’t mean that they don’t matter or wouldn’t help.
It’s not like these ideas are going to fix the world—our political division isn’t solved by $2 bottles of water. But thinking creatively is the first step to dreaming bigger, and we seem to have lost the ability to do both.
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