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Three wacky but sensible policy ideas
There's too much partisanship and too little creativity in lawmaking. Here are some ideas to fix that.
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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.¹ 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 was a coin that existed in the earliest days of the country. But the half-penny died with the Coinage Act of 1857, because it was determined that the half-penny—which would be worth roughly 18¢ today—had too little value.²
It’s high time to simplify things even further with the U.S. dollar—we’re creating complexity and over-precision that’s neither wanted³ 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 $1.1.⁴
What are the benefits?
Increased simplicity of transactions for vendors and customers.
The Mint would get to ditch money-losing pennies and nickels. 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, 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; over that many transactions, the rounding would generally net out.⁵
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.⁶ It’s worth noting that the UK and Australia underwent a significantly more complicated process called decimalization back in the ’60s and ’70s, without the help of computers and in a much shorter period of time, and they did just fine.⁷
Plus, if we move to the one-decimal-point system, maybe we’ll get a delightfully wonderful video like this one from Australia in the mid-’60s.
2. Price controls 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, even though public funding of stadiums is a bad use 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 in 2006.⁸ Now, with the stadium not yet 20 years old, they’re asking for more cash from taxpayers.
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.⁹
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Look, charge whatever you want for beer.¹⁰ But I think any stadium that takes even a dime¹¹ 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 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 benefits¹² 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 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.
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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.¹³
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All of the controversy around the COVID-19 vaccine 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.
It’s important to help people understand how extraordinary the eradication of smallpox really was. Smallpox killed 300 million people in the 20th century—many multiples more than every war in the 20th century combined,¹⁴ 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 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.¹⁵ 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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This has been on my mind since 2008—shout-out to those of us who took AP English Language that year!
Here’s the first exam prompt, if you somehow missed that year’s AP test: “In 2001 United States Representative Jim Kolbe introduced legislation to Congress to eliminate the penny coin in most transactions… Assignment: Read the following sources (including the introductory information) carefully. Then write an essay in which you develop a position on whether or not the penny coin should be eliminated.”
The whole conversation around getting rid of the half-penny has shades of this scene from A Million Ways to Die in the West.
Americans throw away—literally, throw into the trash—$68 million per year in coins, which tells us something about how much people value coins. And that says nothing about all the coins in the purgatory of car seats or couch cushions.
We already do this with sales taxes, which we could calculate to the thousandths place or beyond if we wanted to.
Three notes on this:
The rounding would happen, for most items, after state and local sales taxes, so it’d be pretty hard for retailers to game this and gain any meaningful benefit.
However, if you assume that every single retailer rounded up on every single transaction, this would cost Americans (roughly) $44 more per year. But again: I reject that that’d happen, in large part because retailers would have a strong incentive to drop prices from $9.99 to $9.9 rather than to $10.0, for the psychology reasons I noted above.
If we assume that after including sales taxes, the odds of rounding up or down are 50/50, then the chances that any given American would randomly get rounded up on every single transaction would be infinitesimally small—we’re talking 10^(-255) small. Across this many transactions, the odds of any one American being unlucky (or lucky) to the tune of even $15 over the entire year would be exceedingly unlikely.
Almost everything is done digitally today, and that would give everyone plenty of time for anyone’s point-of-sale software to conform to new rules in a way that wouldn’t cost anyone anything.
The old system with the British pound was almost comically arcane: there were four farthings in a pence, 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound. (I don’t envy 19th-century British accountants.) It’s what inspired the even more arcane monetary system in Harry Potter, if you were wondering.
This data comes directly from the Cardinals, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Other sources suggest that taxpayers spent much more than the team claims.
By the way: you are allowed to bring outside food and non-alcoholic beverages into games, at least at Busch Stadium. But a lot of people don’t know this, and of course, it’s not broadly advertised. Also, this menu is from 2023, so it’s possible that prices went up last year; I’m not sure and couldn’t find an obvious answer online.
Busch Stadium is middle-of-the-pack when it comes to beer prices but has some of the most expensive hot dogs of any stadium in the country. Policy remedies notwithstanding, I’d prefer they do what the Phoenix Suns are doing, and lower prices of their own volition.
See, who needs the penny!
Namely: a) hydration is good, and lowering the price will mean more people buy water, and b) there’d probably be some very slight mix shift from people drinking beers who’d instead drink water, which would reduce (among other things) drunk driving rates. I’ll concede that I don’t have data to back this up—you’d have to model it out—but this would make sense against a standard framework of pricing and economics, even if the benefits are relatively minor.
There are extremely stark differences by political affiliation, which is even more alarming. It’s a huge part of what we’re seeing play out in West Texas, where many counties vote 85%+ for Republicans.
And if you ever find yourself wondering what the Founding Fathers would’ve thought about all of this, Benjamin Franklin—whose four-year-old son died of smallpox—became a staunch advocate of smallpox inoculation for the rest of his life. (The vaccine, as we conceive of it today, wasn’t invented until 1796, but there were earlier, if significantly less effective, methods of trying to prevent its spread and to reduce the fatality rates among the infected.)
This is true, by the way, even if you include civilian deaths (e.g., the Holocaust) and diseases whose spread was advanced by war (e.g., the Spanish flu). It’s truly difficult to fathom just how many people died of smallpox, and it’s jarring to think how quickly we’ve forgotten about it.
In the UK, there’s a museum about Edward Jenner, who invented the first smallpox vaccine, but that’s more about his life than the vaccine or the disease. In Atlanta, what could be best described as a small corner of the CDC Museum is dedicated to smallpox eradication. But that’s really it.
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