We Tested Your Plans to Beat Infinite Money
Pin 05 · downtown
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Noodle just got money that grows 10x every midnight. Last time, it almost broke the world. So we tested YOUR plans from the comments: spend it all, give it away, stop it early, buy the stores. Most of them backfire. One actually works.
What's real in this episode
- Gifts to charities don't pay US gift tax, and $10 billion is more than the US National Cancer Institute's yearly budget (about $7.35 billion).
- In June 1973 the US froze food prices. Shelves went empty, and one Texas hatchery drowned 43,000 chicks it couldn't afford to raise.
- On the island of Yap, a stone coin lost at the bottom of the sea kept counting as a family's wealth for generations.
- If you refuse a prize, you don't count it as income (IRS Publication 525).
- Money only pushes prices up when it's spent: spending = money × how fast it moves.
- Germany 1923: prices doubled about every three or four days. In WWII, Germany forged millions of British pounds (Operation Bernhard).
- The Fed shreds billions of worn-out bills a year, and US paper money is 75% cotton and 25% linen.
- In 2013, PayPal accidentally showed one man a balance of $92,233,720,368,547,800.
Sources
- Gift tax, charitable deduction: 26 USC 2522 — law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/2522
- NCI budget — cancer.gov/about-nci/budget
- 1973 food price freeze, 43,000 chicks: NYT 25 Jun 1973 — nytimes.com/1973/06/25/archives/baby-chicks-killed-and-cooked-for-feed.html
- Nixon, Phase IV statement, 18 Jul 1973 — presidency.ucsb.edu (statement-announcing-measures-be-taken-under-phase-iv)
- Price controls and shortages: Rockoff, Econlib — econlib.org/library/Enc/PriceControls.html
- Yap stone money: Furness 1910 — gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72830/pg72830.txt; Friedman 1991, Hoover WP E-91-3
- Refused prizes: IRS Publication 525 — irs.gov/publications/p525
- Money and spending: IMF F&D 'Back to Basics' (2014) — imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/03/basics.htm
- Weimar hyperinflation: Bundestag — bundestag.de/parlament/geschichte/100-jahre-weimar/hyperinflation-970722
- Operation Bernhard: Bank of England Museum — bankofengland.co.uk/museum/online-collections/blog/operation-bernhard
- Shredding + washing bills: Boston Fed 2019 — bostonfed.org/news-and-events/news/2019/07/when-bills-go-bad.aspx
- Cotton/linen paper: BEP — bep.gov/currency/how-money-is-made
- PayPal 2013: Guinness World Records — guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/112989-largest-accidental-banking-credit
