Obama Eases Treasury Costs with At-Home Money Printing Stimulus

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Everyone is feeling the economic crunch these days, and that includes the Treasury department. It’s no news to anyone here that there has been increasing unhappiness with President Obama’s latest rounds of bailouts, but today could be a turning point for his recent negative PR. And it’s going to save the government a fortune.

Recent reports have shown the US Treasury to be in trouble financially. This from USA Today:

For the first time in U.S. history, the cost of manufacturing both a penny and a nickel is more than the 1-cent and 5-cent values of the coins themselves. Skyrocketing metals prices are behind the increase, the U.S. Mint said in a letter to members of Congress last week.
The Mint estimates it will cost 1.23 cents per penny and 5.73 cents per nickel this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The cost of producing a penny has risen 27% in the last year, while nickel manufacturing costs have risen 19%.

You don’t need to be a financial genius to know that this is just throwing good money down the drain. And plans are already afoot to do away with smaller currencies and ask retailers everywhere to round prices to the nearest 10 cents. This will also stimulate more money for small business, as $2.99 will round to $3.00, giving the store or business an extra penny on each purchase.

However, a plan that is being implemented immediately is the At-Home Money Printing Stimulus. All it requires is a computer and a printer, and you can basically use your home office to print out all the money you need, with your printer being the new ATM.

Using a simple software installation, you will log into your bank account and make a withdrawal, as you would from an ATM. Instead of getting traditional cash, you will instead receive image files (PDFs) that contain the money. For those of you wondering about fraud, each new note will have a unique barcode. See sample below.

Once the barcode has been used once, it will deactivate. So, if anyone tries to photocopy the bills, they will be out of luck. The unique barcode also helps the government track your spending habits. So, if you download $100 and use it at Crate & Barrel, that information will be relayed back to a database, helping the government plan for future stimulus bills.

As almost every store has the ability to read barcodes, this new technology can be implemented straight away. Any smaller outlets without barcode scanners will continue accepting cash, checks and credit cards.

All major banks are on board, and you can download an instruction manual here. It certainly won’t be for everyone, but it’s a step in the right direction and the millions it will save the US in printing costs can be spent on paying down our national debt.