The dollar is dead. In the movies, the scenes where you see the victim of a brutal attack by a crazed knife welding serial killer, spitting and sputtering a mix of blood and air as she takes her last breaths, well... thats the dollar. Don't be fooled. Just because the dollar is still floating around the world as the reserve currency, doesn't mean that the greenback is alive and kicking. All of the nations of the world with dollar holdings are simply keeping their hands on the gaping wounds in our currency long enough so that they themselves can cash in their dollars for something of real value. I have a budding radio talk show (P.I.P.E. Radio- Politics In Plain English). I'm going to explain the grim situation of the dollar in terms that folks like me can understand.

First, let's get clear on what a reserve currency is. To keep this simple, currency is money. Our money is the dollar. Everyone in the America should know that practically every other country in the world uses U.S. dollars. Our money is the current reserve currency of the world. This status is usually attached to a strong Empire. In the past, Rome and Great Brittian also had currencies used worldwide. When a country's money is used by every other nation in the world, that country's government has a great financial responsibility to make good economic decisions. When a country does not make good decisions for it's economy and its finances, the effect is global, and sometimes catastrophic. We are in this situation now.

You may hear people talk about the national debt, the credit crisis, and recession. All of these types of phrases are complicated ways of saying that the government managed our money wrong. Understanding how our government mis-managed the dollar is not as complicated as Joe Anchorhead and the other talking heads would have you believe. All types of money (dollars, pounds, rupees, rubles, yens, and others) are nothing more than I.O.U.s (I owe you). They only represent something of real value. For example, one dollar could equal five minutes worth of work at your job. So if you get paid 12 dollars an hour, the value is not in the paper 12 dollar bills you would recieve, but instead the value is in the amount of work that you finished in an hour. Value is in human productivity- your work. Whether you mine gold, flip burgers, our design rocket ships, money can only be a measurement of what a person's labor is able to produce or create. The government is responsible for deciding how many I.O.U.s are created for the amount of production that is present in a nation. When a government uses a standard measurement to create the I.O.U.s (money), a good economic system can be built around that standard. For instance, one dollar could be equal to an hour of work, or an ounce of silver. For every hour of work done in that nation, or for every ounce of silver available in that country, one dollar can be created. A country that sticks to this standard would have a very stable economy. Financial growth would be based on the amount of extra work done by the country's citizens or the amount of extra silver that country was able to acquire. This sound reasonable, right? Sometimes, governments want their country to grow more than what the nation's productivity and resources (like the silver) will allow. Their only option is to take the resources of another country or create I.O.U.s that doesn't have any value. You hear these two options in the news as war and inflation. In the U.S. we have used both of these methods to gain dominance in the world. The problems with these methods are that our government created many foreign enemies by direct conflict and caused Americans to lose the value of their productivity through inflation. For Americans, inflation is the worst method of growth because while the government allows more money (the I.O.U.s) to be printed for the same amount of goods and services, laws are made so that employers do not have to pay workers more money. For example, the government makes a law saying that your boss only have to pay you 12 dollars an hour, and in that hour you are able to mine one ounce of silver. The government then prints 36 dollars for that ounce of silver instead of the standard 12 dollars. Now your boss can legally sell that silver for 36 dollars or more to make a profit. If you or a coworker wanted to buy that ounce of silver, you would have to work two extra hours, even though you produced that silver for your boss and the government for only 12 dollars or one hour worth of work. The government in cooperation with your boss would have swindled you for 24 dollars or two extra hours of work for the same piece of silver. No matter how complicated politicians, economists, and other leaders try to make the situation seem, if money is allowed to be inflated too much, eventually people will lose faith in that money as a fair standard of measurement for their goods and services, and that money will collapse or cease to be used completely. If war is used to gain resources to support the value of inflated money, eventually the aggressor nation will run out of places to conquer or the enemies that nation created will join together to defeat the aggressor. The U.S. is in all of these situations.

Our dollar is inflated to the point of having 2000 dollars worth of inflated debt for every one dollar of actual value backed money. This is only if The total U.S. productive capacity for a given budget year is used completely for paying the debt (that would never happen). Can you imagine a $2000 bag of Cheetos? The peoples of other nations are tired of working to fund our lavish lifestyles. They are realizing that they shouldn't have to become American citizens to reap the benefits of their work and their country's resources. This leads to our military conquest. America has a well armed, high technology, but relatively small in number millitary. How many different places can we continue to send our troops in defense of maintaining this massive inflationary economy? One day, probably soon, people around the world are simply just going to stop using dollars. We can't shoot everybody. Even if we could, how would we afford $1200 a bullet? All of the enemies created by our government's decisions to spread Dollar Dominated Democracy across the globe have practically turned the whole world against the U.S. Together, they have the power to destroy us without firing a single shot or dropping a single bomb. All they have to do is stop using U.S. dollars and we are finished.

Our dollar is on artificial life support. The global community can pull the plug at any time. The Greenback will not breath on its own. To protect our country from complete economic collapse, we will need a new currency. It will have to be based in a standard acceptable to the world. One thing is for certain, the dollar is dead. In the near future, we will have some form of new money.