They Saved Us

Why not? These two guys, Vasili Arkhov and Stanislov Petrov, saved us by not launching their nuclear weapons. You may already know their stories, but if you haven’t heard, Arkhov didn’t launch his nuclear torpedo against U.S. ships during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and Petrov didn’t act on a false missile launch warning issued by the USSR’s faulty early detection system in 1983. Had either man made a different decision, we wouldn’t be here.

I’m not saying we should replace Washington on the $1 bill with Arkhov, or Trump on the $3 bill with Petrov. With the prime spots already taken, we’ll have to launch (pun intended) new denominations as a platform to display the visages of these heroic “citizens of the world” so curious citizens fingering their money in supermarket checkout lines will want to learn more about them.

Here’s what we’ll do. Seattle recently raised its minimum wage to $15 to reflect the declining value of the dollar. I remember when the minimum wage was $1. The purchasing power is about the same; only the numbers changed. So we’ll put Arkhov on a new $15 bill with the same buying power as a Washington had when I was a teenager. (Yeah, yeah, I know that dates me.) To accommodate Petrov, we’ll add a “0” after “3” to make a $30 bill, which is what 4 years of Trump’s inflation will do to the $3 bill bearing his ugly visage. That’s what $10 trillion of tax-cut deficits do to inflation.

Now, you may ask, why doesn’t someone put me on their money? Good question. It’s not for nothing that many people call money “lettuce.” We rabbits eat the stuff. So does the tax man and your computer repair shop. Well, in response to popular demand, here it is!