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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion editorial

EDITORIAL: It's just money

Last week, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced Harriet Tubman, a former slave and renowned abolitionist, will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

In response, our nation’s most racist, misogynistic and uneducated citizens climbed out of their snake holes to throw a fit over a black woman replacing a white, male president on their currency.

To those of you whose weeks were apparently ruined by the thought of Harriet Tubman appearing on the $20 bill, we, the Editorial Board, would like to politely instruct you to calm down.

If you cared enough to do the research, you’d know that Secretary Lew also announced that the changes to the currency wouldn’t take effect until about the 
year 2030.

Some of you will be dead by then. By that time, all of you will have had so many more problems to worry about than who’s face is on the bills in your wallet.

Certainly, none of you will remain upset about this for the next fourteen years.

In fact, by next month, you’ll have forgotten about it completely.

So calm down now. Stop wasting your breath. It’s only money.

Instead, let’s have a discussion about bigger issues.

Let’s talk about the fact that if Harriet Tubman was alive and working in the United States today, for every $20 bill a white man received, the woman whose face is on that bill would only get $12.60 of it.

That’s a conversation worth having.

Focus less on whose face the Federal Reserve is printing on our bills and more on how the Fed loaned out $16 trillion worth of those bills to domestic and international financial institutions at zero to one percent interest rates as part of the bailout in 2008.

Everyone gets all bent out of shape when the Federal Reserve decides to put an American hero on the front of the $20 bill, but no one seems to care when they loan out enough taxpayer money to fund the United States government for four years.

Let’s talk about how you would have to work 2.75 hours at minimum wage to earn one of those $20 bills, while the average American CEO has to work only 12 seconds to make the same.

Yes, you read that correctly. American CEOs make $5,859/hour.

It’s simply not worth wasting our energy debating who should be on the face of our currency.

We can a name a thousand things that qualify Harriet Tubman to be on the $20 bill.

You probably can’t name one thing that disqualifies her from it.

So let it go.

Let’s get back to the real 
issues.

Let’s stop directing our attention toward issues that don’t affect us, and let’s work together to solve the ones 
that do.

And, by the way, for anyone who’s offended by the new $20 bills, please feel free to send every one you get to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the National Organization for Women in 
protest.

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