Remittance and the U.S. $100 Bill

By Major Van Harl

You may be hocking the wedding rings, or your silver belt buckle to buy Spam and 22LR ammo if you do not prepared.
You may be hocking the wedding rings, or your silver belt buckle to buy Spam and 22LR ammo if you do not prepared.
Major Van Harl USAF Ret
Major Van Harl USAF Ret

United States -(AmmoLand.com)- When I lived in Scotland as a child you heard the word remittance used a lot. When you paid your landlord, the rent you paid was your remittance to him.

When you paid your taxes to include your TV and radio usage tax, you paid your remittance. In the US the word remittance has a very different meaning. A remittance is when a foreign migrant person earns (hopefully) money on US soil and then transfers that income back to their home country.

Now if you are in the US legally on a temporary work visa then we assume you are working for a short time to earn cash to take back home to the mother country. Immigrants for the past two hundred plus years have been landing on these shores and sending money home.

In many cases it was to get the rest of their family members passage to America, but also to help the family that did not “come over.”

To be quite honest, if you are going to permanently immigrated to the US then I believe you should be spending your American earned wages here in the US, but I am not naive. It is your money and if you have paid your taxes, paid your bills and are not taking the government’s welfare dollars, then do what you want with your money, it is your business.

It is your legally earn money to use however you see fit.

My issue is all the money that is flowing out of the US, being sent back home, never to be spent in the US and this is perpetuated by illegally aliens. In 2014 approximately $436 billion left our shores as remittance never to be used to purchase goods and services inside our borders. People came here illegally, worked illegally (often with their employer’s knowledge), took public services illegally and then shipped the lion’s share of their US dollars off shore.

Mexico earns approximately $25 billion dollars a year on exported oil. They take in approximately $25 billion dollars in remittance each year with almost all of it coming from the US. Even if it does not come from the US the remittance almost always comes in US dollars no matter where it comes from.

In the top fifteen nations that take in remittance India is number one, but surprisingly France is number five. I had no idea so many French people came to the US and other places to work and ship dollars back to the home land, like France was a banana republic.

What everyone sends home is $100 bills. Hardly anyone in this country even uses $100 bills, but the rest of the world loves them. The Colonel and I had a Bolivian exchange student live with us for a school year. Her father was always sending her letters with five, $100 bills in them. I do not know what she spent them on, but she sure received a lot of them from home,,,a rare case of reverse remittance I guess?

I talked to a number of people about the $100 bills, and every one of them told me for the most part they never use them. If you are going to the store to buy a $1,000 electronic item you don’t take ten $100 bills to pay for your purchase. No, you use plastic money which is not real money, just electronic blips on a screen. Americans do not think about keeping cash on hand and especially not large amounts of money to make large purchases.

Why should we, isn’t it safer to use “plastic money” and more convenient?

Convenient until the power goes out then you cannot command those electric blips to buy anything. If you have $10, 000 or $10 million in the bank you have nothing if the power is out. What if the power does not come back on for weeks or months?

Somewhere between 76 and 80 percent of outstanding US currency is in $100 bills. Those things Americans do not use (much). Two thirds of all US $100 bills are held outside the US. The American dollar and to be specific the American $100 bill is the reserve currency of the world.

The Euro has in fact taken on more of that mission, but don’t hold your breath on the Euro lasting in your lifetime.

If you could talk to your great-grandparents who came from the old country, they would tell you stories of hoarding small amounts of gold and silver for when the mother-land paper money failed yet again. They tried to assure their personal wealth (no matter how small) with gold.

Money Briefcase
You can get a million US dollars into a standard brief case if you use $100 bills.

What people currently around the world do instead of hoarding gold, they hoard US $100 bills. You can get a million US dollars into a standard brief case if you use $100 bills. It is a lot easier to transport a million dollars in a water tight case when you leave the rocky shores of your former country. Easier than trying to strap a million dollars in gold onto the backs of donkeys and walk through the desert to cross the US border and not get “picked off” along the way. There are calls to do away with the $100 bill.

The illegal drug and arms trafficking world used lots of $100 bills. The kidnap and ransom industry used $100 bills. The $100 bill is not going to go away because the US prints $100 bills and somebody is buying them. Every paper dollar that is residing outside the US is like a free loan to the US government. Someone bought the dollars, but is not spending them inside the US. It is like it is not even there, but it has made a profit for the Federal government. It is good to be king and own the printing presses.

James Wesley Rawles has a series of books about the US dollar collapsing and what that does to North America. I would suggest that if the US dollar is the unofficial reserve currency of the world and if the US dollar collapses than the rest of the world will suffer also. It may take a few more days after the collapse for people holding dollars outside our borders to panic, but with the internet it may be only hours before the domino effect of a failed US dollar has rocked the world.

If the dollar collapses the US politicians cannot print their way out of this crisis. If you are smart and you are one of the few Americans who does believe in holding some $100 bills, you will have a short time of buying power the first few days as the collapse is unfolding. Spend your $100 bills and spend them wisely—there will not be any more because the people who actually print the money will not show up to work only to be paid in paper money.

You may be hocking the wedding rings, or your silver belt buckle to buy Spam and 22LR ammo if you do not prepared. That is not meant to be a joke.

Major Van Harl USAF Ret. / [email protected]

About Major Van Harl USAF Ret.:

Major Van E. Harl USAF Ret., a career Police Officer in the U.S. Air Force was born in Burlington, Iowa, USA, in 1955. He was the Deputy Chief of police at two Air Force Bases and the Commander of Law Enforcement Operations at another. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Infantry School. A retired Colorado Ranger and currently is an Auxiliary Police Officer with the Cudahy PD in Milwaukee County, WI. His efforts now are directed at church campus safely and security training. He believes “evil hates organization.” [email protected].

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Fed Up

Wow, that is some of the roughest grammar I have ever read in a published article.

Clark Kent

Yes, difficult to take the writer seriously due to his atrocious spelling and grammar. Please send him a copy editor! P.S. If you already have 22 Long Rifle ammo and Spam shoot yourself before you are tempted to eat the Spam. Spam is nasty!

TEX

I use $100 bills daily. I wish they still had the $500 bills,I would use those daily too. I’ve never used drugs or been a drug dealer either.

Eric

Change the 100 bill and give 30 days to cash exchange it internationally 60 days in U.S. , you’ll find every 100 bill ever printed , suspected drug money deny the exchange. 40 years of cocaine /drug money worthless over night.