Local Currency to Help Citizens and Save Small Businesses?

Tenino, WA, is printing its own currency to help local businesses. The town set aside $10,000 to back their local currency and are issuing it as a form of welfare for townspeople having trouble making ends meet during the pandemic. A key point is, only local businesses accept the currency. So, it helps two demographics.

Apparently, a lot of towns did something like this during the Great Depression. The article has an interesting history of the phenomenon.

6 comments:

Douglas2 said...

Where I've seen this personally before has been in heavily touristed areas, and it has been successful largely because it allows local business to price-discriminate between locals (inclined to purchase and use the scrip, which is sold at a discount to par) and outsiders, who are unlikely to even know about it.

David Foster said...

I'm betting that a lot of the people who favor keeping money within the community...either through this approach or through local spending of regular dollars...are also people who think there is something bad about policies to make the US as a whole more economically self-contained.

J Melcher said...

In the Depression in the U.S. , "scrip" often carried an "expiration date". Dates were intended to keep it circulating and avoid temptations to hoard.

Oddly, printing paper scrip is legal. Striking metal coin-like tokens of value would seem to be unconstitutional for small towns, or just about any general purpose economy. (Tokens for transit and arcades apparently have exemptions based on ... I dunno, "reasons".)

The U.S. military issues scrip for use on base in remote locations where coins are wastefully heavy to ship in. Bottle top POGs, I think they've been called.

ymarsakar said...

maybe it would be better to get rid of the federal reserve and fiat currency entirely. Gesara/nesara stuff.

Grim said...

I have a collection of POGs somewhere. We used to play poker with them, as they were helpfully labeled by denomination but not technically currency.

Last game we had before I left for home on my first tour, I won a ton. Useless outside Iraq. I donated the whole lot to the unit to use to buy steaks to cook out in my honor. The ones I have are from my second tour.

douglas said...

I remember our parish used to sell scrip to local businesses as a fund raiser. I think the kids elementary school did a version of this too, but it seems to have lost favor for that function.