TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19013, 2 August 1933, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Currency to Accelerate Business. “ Stamped Script ” is the latest currency device being offered in the United States as a moans of ending the depression. While orthodox economists tend to look askance at it, a number of cities have put it into effect with resplts thoroughly satisfactory to themselves.

Under this scheme a municipality issues extra-legal money of its own. It is part of the formula that the city officials shall persuade local merchants to accept their stamped scrip as legal tender, and usually they have no difficulty in doing so. The city then undertakes needed publio works, such as bridges, roadways, and drains, and uses as workmen persons who are unemployed because of the depression. These men are paid, wholly or in part, in stamped setup. * In the best form of the scheme a scrip note in the value of one dollar is good only for one year, and it has on its back 52 blank spaces, each of which must be filled, at intervals of one week, with a stamp which can be purchased from the city treasury. These stamps cost two cents each, and no note is legal unless it bears all the stamps to date. A simple matheipatioal calculation will show that by the end of tho year the city will have received through the sale of stamps 1 dollar 4 coats, enabling it to retire the note and giving it four cents over, which covers tho cqst of manufacturing the stamps and tho clerical item involved.

The advantage of this plan is that it enables a community which k practically bankrupt, as so many American towns now are, to put largo numbers of its unemployed at work immediately. Moreover, stumned scrip is one sort of money which no one cares to hoard, since* in order to do so ho must pay two per cent, of its value each week. Therefore anyone into whose hands it comes does his utmost to pass it on to sojmeone clso before th«t weekly “ ptamp-tax day arrive*. , „ V % ' v y *'