bev,
Bless your heart, it IS hard for someone who's never really tried to deal with all this to understand it all at one swoop. It took me ten years of work to get it across to my mom, and she was born in 1927- when gold coins were still pocket money in the USA. A lifetime of propaganda and long habit makes it really really hard to get past the lies.
You were born after 1964, right? Or so close to 1964 that you were still very little in 1964? You don't have to answer that if you don't want to 8^).
See, I'm an old phart. I was born in the early 1950s. I grew up behind the counter of my dad's little country store, and part of my education was being taught all the flim-flams that city slickers would try to pull on us poor country bumpkins to cheat us out of money. Ever see the movie
Paper Moon with Ryan and Tatum O'Neill? That sort of thing.
I grew up aware of the things that had to do with money, and greed, and cheating. We used to have an old Coke machine out front, one of the little short ones with rounded corners and a lever that you pulled after you put your money in, to get a 6.5 ounce Coke in the classic glass bottle. People would file down pennies till they were the size of a dime, and use them to fool the machine into giving them a Coke and a nickle in change. I still have a little paper bag of those little filed-down pennies in my dad's little safe, and I remember how mad it made him for someone to cheat us out of 9 cents like that.
I was working behind that counter in 1964, just barely into double digits in age, when LBJ said in a speech that 'silver was too valuable to be used as money' and they were changing the coinage. In 1965 the clad copper dimes, quarters started showing up, the Kennedy half dollars stayed 40% silver until 1969 though.
Before 1964 I could take a silver certificate to the local bank (if I could get one, a whole dollar was a LOT of money for me then) and swap it for a big ol' silver dollar. Boy, I thought I was really something then! I loved silver dollars, I was able to accumulate twenty odd of them as a kid and I still have every one of them.
After 1964 there was no more silver minted. Oh, it stayed in circulation for a while. But Gresham's law went to work and real silver coins got scarcer and scarcer. Gresham's law says in essence, "Bad money drives out good." In other words, when clad copper coins and real silver coins are in circulation at the same time, people will spend the clad and save the silver.
And they did.
Of course the banks and the mints were pulling silver out of circulation at the same time, so it didn't take too long for the silver coins to get scarce. After a few years it was rare to see one in circulation.
For the first little while my dad alternated between being mad at me and thinking it was funny that I used to sort out the real silver quarters and dimes. He had to have change to keep the register running, of course, and had no time for a kid's foolishness. Most of the time he would dump the real silver back in the trays at the start of the next day and use it for change. And the next night I'd sort it all out again.
But you know, after a while, when it got to be unusual to see a silver dime or quarter in circulation, he started sorting them out too. And he saved them, then.
Right now each of those silver dimes is worth $1.32. The silver quarters are worth $3.30. The half dollars, the 1964 and before ones, are worth $6.60. And the silver dollars that I swapped a paper dollar to get are worth $14.12. (see
http://www.coinflation.com/ for current silver coin melt values)
How is that? They're still dimes, quarters, half dollars and dollars, right? And we still have dimes and quarters etc. right now that look just like they did then.
Well, sorta. But not exactly.
Remember that Coke machine I was talking about earlier, where you could get a Coke for a nickle? Well, the gas I pumped for customers back then was $.29.9 cents a gallon. Are you catching on yet? You see, more than just the money changed.
The prices of things did too.
It's called INFLATION.
Inflation is still happening. Prices are not really going UP- the purchasing power of your money is still going DOWN. And it is going to continue to do so.
What was a dime's worth of silver in 1964 now costs $1.32.
What was a dime's worth of gas in 1964 (1/3 of a gallon, that is) now costs... about how much? 8^)
3 X $1.32 = $3.96. How much is a gallon of gas where you live right now? I'd bet it's about $4.00, right?
So.... you can still buy a gallon of gas for thirty cents-
as long as it's in silver.
Does that help?
dd
ps- please read my SIG, just below here...