The Wheat Dollar. The Gold Dollar. The Steel Dollar. They had lots of names for money, but everyone called them NewBucks or NuBux.
A week after the General came on tv, the new money came out. You had to bring in your old dollars, the green ones, and you would get some of the new money. It was different colors so there would be no confusion. Wheat Dollars were this really pretty shade of yellow. Steel Dollars were blue.
You got so many NuBux for old money. Ten green dollars got you one NuBux. Dad was mad about it, but he didn't understand how things worked at first. William and I learned about it when the schools reopened. It was the first thing they told us about.
The second thing they told us at school was how we were supposed to pay for our education. The teacher (who was new) said that parents had to pay for school directly now. There was not a tax base to support all of the public schools so if you went to school, you paid for it. Also, our parents had mandatory hours they had to work at the school. Lunch room duty, library duty, clean up and so on.
Old people and those who did not have kids in school did not have to pay for it anymore. If you did not want to pay for school or couldn't you could home school, but you had to register. A bunch of people got mad the the government would not teach their kids or that the government made them work at their kids school. They pulled their kids and tried to homeschool them, but most gave up after a month or so.
Mom and dad also have to come to the school once a month for a one on one talk with our teachers. If we are falling behind in school, there is a work plan all of us have to agree to follow. Its in the contract parents, kids and schools have to sign now.
If a kid fails out, the parents have to find another school that will take them. It's not too hard because every school is independent now. William's and my school has a manager who runs the place. The teachers are hired by her and get paid for doing their jobs. If the teacher is not doing his or her job they get the boot.
NuBux are stronger than the old dollars. That is what we learned on day one. NuBux are based upon commodities. That is the word for real stuff the United States produces. The top commodity is food. The United States could feed the world with one hand behind its back if it wanted to and I am pretty proud about that fact. I never knew that before. I thought all we made were music videos and cell phones.
The value of a NuBux depends upon the value of a commodity on any given day. Right now, our money is pretty strong because of the world demand for food, energy and refined goods like steel and gasoline. The rest of the world is still limping along using money that their government tells them is worth something when actually it is worth nothing.
Dad said people wanted money based upon gold like they used to. I explained to him that there was not enough gold in the world to finance our economy, not unless we wanted an ounce of gold to be worth a million dollars or something. Instead, we use all of our nation's real assets to value our money. Everyone is part of the process.
The rest of the world was worse off than we were. Some of them got really mad at the US for changing the rules and breaking everything. The Chinese were really angry at the US.
We fixed them.
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