In 2003, the Federal Reserve's budget for printing and distributing new currency rose 18.5%, to $510.3 million. Most of that increase is due to the higher billing rate for the newly-redesigned $20 bill.
The old $20 note cost about 68 cents to produce. The new design of the $20 bill costs 99 cents, a 45% increase. Some of that cost was for "public education," so that the Reserve could tell us taxpayers all about the shiny new currency with its peach and pale blue tones, its color-shifting ink, its special hidden portraits of Andrew Jackson and its unrelenting hostility to counterfeiters.
The Federal Reserve also spent $2.9 million on its counterfeit deterrence program in 2003.
And what, pray tell, did we taxpayers get for all this?
Nothing, apparently, that couldn't be defeated by anyone with a scanner and Adobe Photoshop.
At the request of the Federal Reserve and various important banker-type persons, Adobe secretly inserted 3rd-party code into its Photoshop software that will not allow you to open any file that contains an image of US currency:
The U.S. Federal Reserve and other organizations that worked on the technology said they could not disclose how it works and would not name which other software companies include it in their products. They cited concerns that counterfeiters would try to defeat it.
Sort of like they've defeated every other anti-counterfeit measure, despite the millions spent by the Reserve. Hey, why should a government be responsible for securing its own money supply? Let's give the private sector the tools to do it! At the expense of the consumer! In a really sneaky way! Great! We should have thought of this before.
I'm with Doctorow on this one (mark this date: that's a very rare occurrence).
In other news: Crane, manufacturers of high-quality paper products and suppliers of currency stock to the Federal Reserve, announced today that attempts to photocopy currency onto any of its high rag-content papers would result in the explosion of that paper.
