<p>I ran across a 2021 meme the other day that vividly illustrates just how quickly the government is destroying your money.</p>
<p>The meme points out that in 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25, or five quarters. That sounds really low, but keep in mind that before 1965, quarters were 90 percent silver. In 2021, the melt value of those five quarters was $23.34.</p>
<p><img src="https://www.moneymetals.com/uploads/content/minimum-wage-quarter-meme.jpg" width="500" height="490" alt="" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></p>
<p>In other words, the five quarters a minimum wage worker earned in an hour in 1964 had $23.34 in purchasing power in 2021. There's your "living wage."</p>
<p>That’s pretty staggering in and of itself, but now fast forward a few years. As of today, the melt value of those five quarters is <strong>$34.45</strong>.</p>
<p>In other words, the value (purchasing power) of those five quarters has increased by another <strong>47.6 percent</strong> in just three and a half years!</p>
<p>This reflects the relentless devaluation of U.S. money.</p>
<h2>What Happened to Our Money?</h2>
<p>Under the <em>Coinage Act</em> signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the U.S. Treasury removed all of the silver from dimes, quarters, and half-dollars. Instead, the government mints coins from “composites, with faces of the same alloy used in our 5-cent piece that is bonded to a core of pure copper.”</p>
<p>You will sometimes hear <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/pre-1965-junk-silver-coins-half-dollars-kennedy-franklin/34">coins minted before 1965 referred to as “junk silver.”</a></p>
<p>In reality, we should call modern American coins junk. </p>
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<p>Johnson promised that removing silver would have no impact on the value of U.S. coinage, asserting that “[The] Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin." </p>
<p>You'll be shocked to learn he was lying. </p>
<p>Richard Nixon told a similar fib when he severed the last tie between the U.S. dollar and gold. When he announced the closing of the gold window, Nixon said, “Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation,” and promised, “Your dollar will be worth just as much as it is today.”</p>
<p>As we all know, that’s not what happened. The dollar buys a fraction of what it did in 1971, and U.S. quarters minted after 1965 are virtually worthless.</p>
<p>The meme tells the story. We don’t have a wage problem in the U.S. We have a money problem. And it is rapidly getting worse.</p>
<p>This is why you don’t want to hold fiat currency for any amount of time. It is losing value minute by minute. You need real money – gold and silver.</p>
