Money bill and dollars | Just a Fellow Americ

Money is a Bill and Dollars

This is the sister piece to Money is a Beer Bottle and Beer. Beer is easier to visualize than dollars.

I'm going to split our typical understanding of the word money into two parts. This is for my use only in this site. I'm not proposing the world change its definition of money. For me and me only, this is money:

A "bill" is a store of value with a visible number
- A coin minted by government
- A piece of paper printed by government
- A check
- A number in an account
- We typically think of a $20 bill as just the piece of paper printed by government. For my use only, a $20 “bill” is $20 in coins, $20 in bills, a $20 check and $20 in an account.
- The number on it (the denomination of the coin or bill, the number on the check or account) doesn't change over time
A dollar is the value in the "bill" that's an invisible number
- What’s in the bill that actually buys stuff
- The thing created only by labor
- This number changes over time due to inflation

We're used to looking at a piece of paper with a dollar sign and 100 on it as a $100 bill or a $100 check or a $100 price tag or a bank statement with $100 on it. What each of those tells you is incomplete because what that dollar sign and number implies is more and more false over time. There's a difference between $100 (the store of value) and 100 dollars (the value it contains).

A $100 bill is only half of what's money, it's only the store of value part. The value it stores is in dollars, and is typically a number that's smaller than what's printed on the bill. To illustrate this, see Inflation - More Beer Bottles Than Beer.

When I use the word "money" I mean the bill and the dollars it contains. When I use the word "bill" I mean the store of value and not the value it contains. When I use the word "dollars" I mean the value the bill (store of value) contains, regardless of the number printed on the bill.

Understand, I'm not an economic expert with a spreadsheet. I'm just a person with six decades of experience being in an economy.

I try to understand the economy by looking at it from different angles. I try to figure out how to simplify its description. I've grown to be a big opponent of "it's complicated." That just makes us frustrated when trying to understand.

Complexity justifies the existence of experts. Simplicity makes them obsolete.

Just a fellow American