The Great Cat Migration

Did 5,000 Siberian Cats really save Western Civilization?   (Spoiler Alert:  Nope.)  The story goes something like this:

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared.  Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten by people who had reached the unfortunate stage of starvation at which Fluffy with gravy begins to sound less appalling than it normally would.

With the cats gone, millions of rats poured into the city.  They marched through the streets in vast gray armies, attacked food warehouses, gnawed through electrical wires, overran the Hermitage Museum, and prepared to eat their way through several centuries of European art.   Rembrandt Tartare.

Then, following the breaking of the siege, the Soviet government launched the Great Cat Migration.  Five thousand specially selected Siberian cats were collected in Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, and other distant cities.  They were placed aboard a special train and transported thousands of miles to Leningrad.

When the train arrived, the doors were opened, the cats charged into battle, the rats were annihilated and Western civilization was saved.  The cats were installed in the Hermitage, where their descendants continue guarding the Rembrandts, Leonardos, and assorted imperial furniture to this day.

It is a wonderful story.  Unfortunately, it may contain almost as much fiction as the average congressional budget proposal.

The actual story begins in 1745, when Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, issued a genuine imperial decree ordering that 30 of the finest and largest mouse-catching tomcats be obtained from Kazan and delivered to the imperial court.

Kazan cats were reputed to be particularly formidable mousers.  Apparently, eighteenth-century Russia had already developed regional cat rankings, although ESPN had not yet begun televising the playoffs.

The decree specified that the cats should be large, good at catching mice, properly fed during the journey—and castrated.

That last qualification becomes important whenever someone claims that the cats currently living at the Hermitage are direct descendants of Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats.  Unless eighteenth-century Russian veterinarians were remarkably incompetent, those 30 tomcats did not leave descendants.

Nor, strictly speaking, did Elizabeth introduce cats to the “Hermitage Museum.” The present Winter Palace was not begun until 1754, and Catherine the Great did not establish the art collection that became the Hermitage until 1764.  Elizabeth brought cats to the imperial court.  The later palace and museum inherited the tradition.

Over the following centuries, cats were kept in the Winter Palace to control mice and rats in its kitchens, storerooms, corridors, and cellars.  As the palace accumulated paintings, furniture, tapestries, books, and other objects upon which rodents might dine, the cats became unofficial guardians of the imperial collections.

They were not art critics, but they were certainly more useful than most art critics.

Cats, Rats, and the Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad began in September 1941 and lasted until January 1944.  It was one of the most appalling episodes of the Second World War.  Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, most from starvation, cold, and disease.

During the Siege of Leningrad, virtually every cat in the city disappeared.  Some starved, some froze to death, and some were eaten.  There was nothing historically unusual about people eating rodents—British sailors, for example, ate shipboard rats known as “millers,” apparently because the animals emerged from the flour stores looking as though they had been working the night shift in a bakery.  Cats, however, were household pets, and eating the family cat required a rather more desperate adjustment in culinary standards.  By the winter of 1941–42, many Leningraders had reached precisely that point.

The disappearance of the cats contributed to a serious rodent problem.  Rats threatened what little food remained and damaged buildings, wiring, archives, and stored materials.  The Hermitage was not immune, although most of its greatest treasures had already been evacuated to Sverdlovsk before conditions became completely disastrous.

Popular accounts often say that every cat in Leningrad died during the siege.  That is probably an exaggeration.  Contemporary records mention individual cats appearing in the city by early 1943, and several families later claimed that their pets survived.

The most famous was Maxim, whose owners reportedly protected him throughout the siege, occasionally locking him in a room to prevent a hungry relative from turning him into dinner.  Maxim may indeed have survived the entire siege.  Calling him “the only cat in Leningrad to survive,” however, would require a citywide feline census conducted under conditions in which the government had more pressing administrative concerns.

What can be said with confidence is that cats became extremely rare and extremely valuable.  By 1943, a kitten could cost several times the price of a loaf of bread.  Once people no longer needed to consider cats as food, they again wanted them as pets and rat catchers.

Enter the Meowing Division

This is where history begins turning into folklore.

According to one version, after Soviet forces opened a land corridor into Leningrad in January 1943, city authorities ordered four railway cars filled with gray or “smoky” cats from the Yaroslavl region.  These cats supposedly arrived while the siege was still underway and immediately began exterminating rats.

According to another version, the great shipment occurred after the siege ended in January 1944.  This time, approximately 5,000 cats were collected across Siberia, with Tyumen serving as a major collection point.  Residents donated household pets, officials rounded up strays, and a special train carried the animals to Leningrad.

Some accounts combine both stories: first came the Yaroslavl cats, followed by the larger Siberian feline reserve.

The details vary considerably.  Depending upon the person telling the story, there were two railway cars, four railway cars, or an entire train.  There were 500 cats, 1,000 cats, or 5,000 cats.  They arrived in 1943, 1944, or 1945.  They came from Yaroslavl, Tyumen, Omsk, Irkutsk, or all of the above.

This is generally not a sign that historians have uncovered an unusually rich collection of corroborating evidence.

In 2020, researchers at St. Petersburg State University reported that they had searched government records, wartime diaries, letters, and memoirs without finding confirmation of the famous trainload of cats.  They concluded that the mass migration story was probably a postwar legend representing a return to normal life—a time when cats could once again be pets and useful companions rather than emergency food.

That does not mean no cats were brought into Leningrad.  They almost certainly were.  Returning evacuees carried pets with them.  People bought, traded, and transported cats.  Officials probably encouraged their introduction, and some organized shipments may have occurred.

But the image of exactly 5,000 specially recruited Siberian commandos boarding the Feline Express and reporting for duty at the Hermitage remains unverified.

The recovery of Leningrad’s cat population was probably gradual and untidy.  Cats arrived from many places, reproduced, wandered into buildings, and were adopted by residents.  Traps, poison, sanitation programs, and ordinary pest-control work also helped reduce the rat population.

In other words, history did what history generally does: it unfolded through thousands of small, poorly documented actions.  Posterity then improved it by adding a special train.

Today, approximately 50 cats currently live beneath the Hermitage.  The number fluctuates because cats occasionally wander in, are rescued by employees, or are surrendered to the museum.  Others are adopted by carefully screened families.

The cats have names, identification documents, veterinary records, vaccinations, bowls, beds, and medical care.  They live primarily in the cellars, service areas, and courtyards.  They are not normally permitted to stroll through the galleries, critique the Dutch masters, or sharpen their claws on a Louis XVI chair.

Their modern pest-control value is largely preventive.  The smell and presence of cats discourage rodents from entering the area.  The cats themselves are reportedly well-fed and not always enthusiastic hunters.  One was once photographed peacefully watching a rat drink from its bowl, suggesting that feline work ethic has deteriorated since the heroic days of 1944.

The museum nevertheless treats them as honorary employees and public-relations ambassadors.  They have a veterinarian, caretakers, sponsors, an adoption program, an annual Hermitage Cat Day, and even an official spokeswoman.

Whether any are descended from the cats brought into Leningrad after the siege is impossible to establish.  Museum representatives say that a few descendants of the Yaroslavl cats remain, but there is no published pedigree or genetic study proving it.  The modern colony has absorbed stray cats and rescued animals for decades, and its members are routinely sterilized.

They are not a special breed.  They are ordinary mixed-breed cats with an unusually impressive business address.

A few wildly popular—and equally inaccurate—stories about the Hermitage cats deserve to be tossed out with the cat litter.

Peter the Great brought the first Hermitage cat, Vasily, from Holland.  Perhaps.  It is an old and charming tradition, but there is no contemporary documentation proving it.  Other versions say Peter obtained Vasily in Russia from a Dutch merchant.  Apparently, even the legendary cat’s travel documents have been misplaced.

The present cats descend from Elizabeth’s original Kazan cats.  No.  Elizabeth ordered castrated tomcats.  Their dynasty was over before it began.

Five thousand pedigree Siberian cats arrived aboard one special train.  There is no documentary confirmation.  Furthermore, “Siberian cats” may simply mean cats collected in Siberia, not 5,000 registered members of the modern Siberian breed traveling with certificates and matching luggage.

Every cat receives a government salary.  They receive food, housing, and veterinary care.  They do not receive rubles, pension contributions, paid vacation, or compensatory time for working nights.  Perhaps they should start a union.

A wealthy Frenchman left the cats an enormous fortune.  This one is partially true, which makes it ideal for the Internet.  A French admirer did include the Hermitage cats in his will.  Headlines breathlessly announced that the cats had inherited a “fortune,” conjuring images of 50 newly wealthy felines lounging aboard yachts, manipulating offshore accounts, and refusing to associate with common alley cats. 

The actual inheritance was approximately €3,000.  Divided among 50 cats, that comes to roughly €60 apiece—enough for each cat to purchase a respectable quantity of food, but probably not enough to establish a hereditary European banking family.

Still, €3,000 is €3,000.  It may not have made the Hermitage cats rich, but it did place them in a small and exclusive category: cats who have inherited more money than most cats and performed more useful government service than many humans.

Elon Musk and the Long Range Foundation

In Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel, Time for the Stars, mankind’s most important scientific work is financed by an organization called the Long Range Foundation.  The Foundation invests in research so speculative, expensive, and slow that governments, corporations, and sensible people want nothing to do with it.

Naturally, the projects keep succeeding.  A sustained and diversified portfolio of research usually pays off in the long run, even though most individual research projects do not.

Weather control and other improbable ventures make enormous amounts of money, so the Foundation invests in even more improbable ventures.  Eventually, it becomes fabulously wealthy and can afford to finance interstellar spaceships, telepathy experiments, and anything else that strikes its directors as potentially useful to humanity.  It is the ultimate virtuous circle: invest vast sums of money on unlikely research, accidentally make a fortune, and use the fortune to investigate something even crazier.

This was science fiction when Heinlein wrote it.  Today, we call it the Elon Musk business plan.

Musk made his first serious money from Zip2 and, then, a much larger fortune from PayPal.  He could have purchased several islands, a respectable collection of yachts, and enough politicians to start his own congressional caucus.  Instead, he put much of his fortune into electric automobiles and rockets.

At the time, neither investment looked particularly sensible.

Electric cars were slow, unattractive little vehicles with limited range.  They were marketed chiefly to people who believed smugness should be classified as an alternative fuel.  Rockets, meanwhile, were built by governments and gigantic defense contractors.  Starting a private rocket company sounded approximately as reasonable as announcing that you intended to build your own aircraft carrier in the backyard.

Musk did both.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 with the modest objective of reducing launch costs, making rockets reusable, colonizing Mars, and saving the human race.  Most new businesses begin with more manageable goals, such as surviving until Friday.

The first three Falcon 1 launches failed.  Spectacularly.  SpaceX was running out of money, and Musk was simultaneously trying to keep Tesla alive.  Had the fourth launch failed, SpaceX probably would have collapsed.  It succeeded.

SpaceX subsequently developed the Falcon 9, Dragon spacecraft, and reusable booster systems.  Landing an orbital-class rocket vertically had long been considered technically possible but economically doubtful.  SpaceX turned it into something approaching routine.  Boosters now return to Earth and land upright on platforms at sea, looking like something Heinlein would have rejected as a little too theatrical.

SpaceX also created Starlink, which required launching thousands of satellites before the system could produce anything resembling an adequate return.  A conventional company would have balked at the cost.  A government program would have required years of hearings concerning orbital debris, rural broadband, environmental impact statements, minority contracting requirements, and whether the satellites were being launched from a politically equitable selection of congressional districts.

Musk ignored all of the problems and just launched them.

Tesla followed a similar path.  Musk did not create the original company, although he became its largest early investor and eventually its dominant executive. Tesla began with the Roadster, proved that an electric car did not have to resemble a golf cart with doors, and then gambled heavily on the Model S.

The company came close to failure more than once.  It nevertheless built factories, developed battery systems, established a charging network, and forced nearly every major automobile manufacturer to take electric vehicles seriously.  One need not believe that every Tesla is perfect—or that every prediction from Musk arrives on schedule—to recognize that he changed the automobile industry.

Then there is Neuralink.

Neuralink is attempting to produce a practical interface between the human brain and computers. Its current experimental implants have allowed people with severe paralysis to control computer cursors and other devices through thought.  The company is also developing Blindsight, an implant intended to create visual perception by stimulating the visual cortex directly.

Musk has suggested that Blindsight could eventually allow blind people to see and might someday provide vision extending into ultraviolet or infrared wavelengths.  For the moment, that portion remains a promise rather than an accomplishment. Musk’s predictions are frequently delivered according to a calendar that has only a casual relationship with the one hanging on everyone else’s wall.

Still, the research is real.  It requires neuroscientists, surgeons, engineers, custom electronics, experimental robots, regulatory approval, years of testing, and an astonishing amount of money. There is no guarantee of success. There may not even be a clearly defined path to success. That is precisely why ordinary investors are reluctant to finance it.

There are, of course, caveats.

Private capital did not accomplish all this by itself. SpaceX received hundreds of millions of dollars in NASA development payments and later billions in government contracts. NASA provided knowledge, facilities, technical standards, and—most importantly—a dependable customer.

Tesla received a $465 million Department of Energy loan that helped finance the Model S and its Fremont manufacturing plant.  Tesla repaid the loan early, but the government assumed a risk that private lenders were unwilling to accept.  Electric-vehicle tax credits also helped create a market.

Neuralink stands on decades of neuroscience and brain-computer-interface research conducted at universities, hospitals, and government laboratories, much of it financed by taxpayers.

Musk did not invent rocketry, electric motors, lithium-ion batteries, satellites, or brain implants.  What his companies have done exceptionally well is combine existing scientific knowledge, take it out of the laboratory, and force it through the long, expensive, humiliating process of becoming a useful product.

Nor does a large fortune automatically produce technological miracles.  Jeff Bezos has invested billions in Blue Origin without matching the accomplishments of SpaceX.  Musk’s Boring Company has yet to transform transportation, and the Hyperloop appears to have been placed in the same imaginary warehouse where we keep flying cars and household nuclear reactors.

Money is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by technical judgment, disciplined management, persistence, and a willingness to look foolish for a very long time.  Musk exhibits a remarkable tolerance for failure, steadfastly continuing to financially support projects long after a board of directors would have cut their losses and pulled the plug.

Government certainly can conduct great research. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, the internet, GPS, jet engines, nuclear power, and much of modern medicine demonstrate that beyond dispute.  Government is particularly good at financing basic science because the benefits are widely dispersed and may not appear for decades.

The difficulty is not that government lacks money.  The difficulty is that government lacks patience under public observation.

Imagine a federal rocket program exploding three vehicles in succession.  The first explosion would produce an investigation. The second would produce televised hearings. After the third, members of Congress would demand resignations, refunds, criminal prosecutions, and perhaps a constitutional amendment prohibiting rockets.

No administrator would be rewarded for saying, “Yes, we destroyed $100 million today, but we learned a great deal.”

A private investor can call that research.  A newspaper calls it a scandal.

Government programs must survive elections, annual appropriations, changes of administration, hostile committees, inspectors general, environmental lawsuits, and the evening news.  A project that will require fifteen years of failure before producing a breakthrough must be defended repeatedly to people whose next election is never more than two years away.

Public pressure demands visible results, predictable schedules, and an explanation for every failure.  Genuine experimental research offers none of those things.  It advances through wrong turns, broken equipment, embarrassing mistakes, and discoveries that were not included in the original PowerPoint presentation.

A large pool of private capital provides something more important than money: insulation.  It gives researchers time to fail without having the project canceled by a congressional committee or converted into a campaign issue.  It allows one generation of profits to finance the next generation of speculation.

The ideal system is, therefore, neither government nor private enterprise. Government should finance basic research, absorb risks that society as a whole must bear, establish reasonable regulations, and become the first customer for valuable new technology.  Private capital should perform the frantic experimentation, integration, manufacturing, and cost reduction that government manages poorly.  There are some projects that are only feasible if large pools of capital are in the hands of relatively few people. 

Heinlein understood the essential point. The Long Range Foundation succeeded because it possessed enough money to ignore short-range thinking.

Musk has not created Heinlein’s Foundation and he certainly has not succeeded at everything he has attempted.  But he has demonstrated that civilization occasionally benefits from having an enormously wealthy eccentric willing to spend a fortune on ideas that respectable people consider ridiculous.

Some of those ideas remain ridiculous.

A few become the future.

The King Who Hated Tobacco—Right Up Until He Taxed It

You could call it royal hypocrisy.  You could call it cognitive dissonance.  You could even call it moral inconsistency—assuming, of course, that someone who claimed a divine right to rule over everyone else was expected to have morals in the first place.  Personally, I'll settle for economic opportunism on a truly royal scale, courtesy of King James I of England.

But before we get to James and his famous hatred of tobacco, we need to back up a few thousand years.

Actually...more than 12,000 years.

Long before Europeans had ever heard of tobacco, Native peoples in South America were cultivating and using it.  The plant probably originated somewhere in the Andes or nearby western South America before spreading throughout the Americas.  It was smoked, chewed, snuffed, and used in religious ceremonies from the Amazon to what is now Canada.  Contrary to popular belief, the earliest smokers probably weren't rolling cigars.  They were more likely smoking loose tobacco in primitive pipes or as wrapped leaves, while true cigars seem to have been developed much later, in the Caribbean.

Like every successful vice in history, tobacco traveled well.  Whether it spread because people enjoyed it, because they believed it had medicinal value, or because nicotine is one of the world's more persuasive chemicals is anyone's guess.  Archaeologists have found evidence that people were using wild tobacco in what is now Utah roughly 12,000 years ago. That does not  mean they were farming it, however.  Deliberate cultivation probably began somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago, making tobacco one of the oldest domesticated plants in the New World.

The first Europeans to encounter tobacco arrived with Christopher Columbus in 1492.  While exploring Cuba, two members of his expedition reported that the local Taíno people carried "firebrands and bundles of leaves" that they lit and inhaled.  The Europeans had just witnessed the world's first recorded cigar smokers.  Columbus himself wasn't particularly impressed, but one of his sailors, Rodrigo de Jerez, apparently acquired the habit and may have become the first European smoker.

The Taíno also gave Europe the word tobacco—or at least something close to it.  Historians still argue over whether the original word referred to the plant itself or to the Y-shaped tube used to inhale its smoke.  Either way, within little more than a century the strange New World weed would conquer Europe far more effectively than any Spanish conquistador ever could.

By the late 1500s, tobacco had become the latest must-have import for Europe's upper crust.  Spanish and Portuguese sailors carried it home first, and before long it had reached England.  Contrary to popular legend, Sir Walter Raleigh did not introduce tobacco to England.  English sailors and explorers had already encountered it and members of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony returned home smoking it.  Raleigh's real contribution was far more powerful: he made it fashionable.  As he was one of Queen Elizabeth I's favorite courtiers, anything Raleigh did instantly became more interesting.  If Sir Walter had shown up wearing a lobster on his head, half the nobility would have been shopping for crustaceans by week's end.

We are certain that Raleigh demonstrated his new fad at court, but whether the Virgin Queen ever sampled the weed is not recorded, but I like to think she got to enjoy at least one good vice.

Then, in 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and was succeeded by James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England.  James took one look at the growing number of Englishmen puffing away on clay pipes and reacted much the way a modern health crusader reacts to a teenager with a vape.

In 1604, he published his famous pamphlet, A Counterblaste to Tobacco.  It wasn't merely a criticism of smoking—it was a full-throated literary assault.  James described tobacco as:

"A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs..."

That is one of history's more memorable one-sentence product reviews, even if the King neglected to put it on Yelp. (That’s quite a contrast to the positive advertising by tobacco sellers some 360 years later—and those guys knew about the scientific evidence that backed up the claims made by the king!)

Given such strong feelings, you might expect James to outlaw tobacco entirely.

He didn't.

Instead, in that very same year, he imposed what amounted to one of the biggest "sin taxes" in English history.  The import duty on tobacco jumped from 2 pence per pound to 6 shillings and 10 pence per pound.  Since there are twelve pence in a shilling, that meant the tax soared from 2 pence to 82 pence per pound—a staggering forty-one-fold increase.

Apparently, tobacco was so vile, so disgusting, so offensive to God and man...that the Crown simply couldn't afford to let anyone stop buying it.

The plan worked—sort of.  The higher tax generated revenue, but it also generated smugglers, who quickly discovered that avoiding an eighty-two-penny tax could be a profitable line of work.  Eventually the government moderated the duty, not because James had softened his opinion of tobacco, but because confiscating contraband is considerably less profitable than collecting taxes on legal imports.

The irony only deepened over time.  England's American colony at Jamestown was struggling to survive until John Rolfe began growing a sweeter variety of tobacco that English smokers actually wanted to buy.  Suddenly, the "loathsome" weed became the economic engine that kept Virginia alive.  Before long, English ships were carrying ever-larger cargoes of tobacco across the Atlantic, customs officials were collecting ever-larger duties, and the Crown was becoming increasingly dependent on revenue from the very product its king had condemned as an abomination.

Walk into an English tavern in about 1700 and you'd likely be handed two things: a mug of ale and a long-stemmed white clay pipe.  The pipe wasn't yours, mind you—it belonged to the tavern, just like the tankard and (probably) the cat sleeping by the fireplace.  You smoked it, handed it back, and the innkeeper tossed it into the hottest part of the fire.  Before long it was hot enough to burn away every trace of tobacco—and quite possibly every germ within a hundred yards.  Centuries before anyone had heard of bacteria, publicans had accidentally invented a remarkably effective sterilization process.

The pipes themselves were so inexpensive that they were practically the disposable coffee cups of the seventeenth century.  Most cost only a fraction of a day's wages, and if one broke, nobody shed a tear.  Archaeologists have since repaid the favor by digging up millions of broken stems and using them to date old settlements with surprising accuracy.  It seems the humble tavern pipe, designed to be smoked, broken, and forgotten, has become one of history's most talkative little artifacts.

History has a wicked sense of humor.  Governments often discover that the fastest way to embrace a vice is to figure out how to tax it.  James I may have sincerely hated tobacco, but he also loved revenue.  Faced with choosing between his principles and his treasury, the treasury won by forty-one to one.

 

A New Presidential Coin?

It is almost impossible for me to tell a story without going to the very beginning.  When I taught the freshman course of Western Civilization, I started with Australopithecus and worked my way forward.  So, today we really have to begin with the Civil War.

The Civil War was, like all wars, far more costly than expected.  Congress responded in predictable fashion: it raised taxes, which is pretty much a reflex action, since the typical congressman will want to raise taxes if he sneezes.  Then, still short of funds, Congress borrowed money and when this also failed to raise enough money, Congress authorized the printing of currency that was not backed by anything but the faith that the government would eventually exchange the paper currency for gold or silver.  Within a very short time, it took $285 of currency to buy $100 in gold. 

Economists have a simple description for when any government has two types of official currency.  Called Gresham’s Law, it simply states, “Bad money chases out good.”  This means that, if the government has issued two types of money, people will hoard the “good” money—defined as the money they trust—so that only the “bad” money will be left in circulation.  This is exactly what happened during the Civil War:  as unbacked paper currency was introduced, people hoarded silver and gold.

Unfortunately, this also caused a scarcity of silver and gold coins.  Silver quarters, dimes, and half-dimes quickly became scarce.  (They were called half-dimes since the “nickel”—a coin made of 75% copper and 25% nickel—was not introduced until after the Civil War.).  This made regular commercial transactions difficult.  A single dollar at that time had the purchasing power of over $40 in today’s economy.  You can imagine the difficulty in trying to buy a pack of gum if the smallest bill in circulation today were a $50 bill.

Congress formally authorized the use of postage stamps for government payments in July 1862, but once again, Gresham’s Law kicked in and soon there was a severe shortage of postage stamps. 

To solve this problem, Congress turned—once again—to the printing press, and soon issued fractional notes worth 3, 5, 10, 25, and 50 cents each.  The government ultimately issued about $369 million in fractional notes between 1862 and 1876. 

In 1864, Congress authorized a new printing of 5-cent notes and requested that instead of putting the image of Washington or Jefferson on the note, they honor Clark of the famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition.  The order was sent to the National Currency Bureau, the predecessor of today’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing.  And here is where the wicket gets sticky.  The superintendent of the bureau was Spencer M. Clark, who promptly saw a golden opportunity—so he produced the new fractional notes with his image instead of that of the famous explorer.  Technically, he had done as ordered.

Maybe he thought no one would recognize him and notice the difference.

Congress was furious.  Representative Martin Thayer of Pennsylvania argued that Treasury officials were abusing their authority to select currency portraits.  On April 7, 1866, Congress enacted language providing that,

“No portrait or likeness of any living person hereafter engraved shall be placed” on federal bonds, securities, notes, or fractional currency.

Clark was not the first living official placed on currency—Salmon P. Chase, Francis Spinner, and William Fessenden had also appeared—but Clark’s audacity was the last straw.  Congress soon discontinued paper notes worth less than ten cents, and the new five-cent nickel replaced Clark’s paper five-cent bill.

Clark surprisingly kept his position until 1868. His little act of bureaucratic vanity, however, created a rule that supposedly governed American money from that point forward: if you wanted your portrait on U.S. currency, you ordinarily had to kick the bucket first.

Well, no… Reread that law; it does not actually prohibit living people from appearing on coins.  Its wording covered federal “bonds, securities, notes, fractional or postal currency”—in other words, paper obligations. 

In 1926, to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of American independence, Congress authorized a commemorative 50-cent coin portraying George Washington and then president Calvin Coolidge on the obverse and the Liberty Bell on the reverse.  Congress authorized up to one million half dollars, which the exposition commission bought at face value and resold for a dollar each.

As a fundraiser, it was a colossal flop—the public wasn’t interested in buying a half-dollar coin for twice the face value, and over 85% of the coins were returned to the mint and melted down.  If you can find an uncirculated coin today, it’s worth about a hundred dollars. 

Having been burned, Congress wanted to keep the nation’s coinage from becoming political advertising.  Allowing a sitting president to place his own portrait on government money smacks of kings, emperors, and assorted dictators who have traditionally regarded national mints as their personal publicity departments.  Restricting presidential coins to the dead keeps the currency historical and nonpartisan—or at least ensures that its subject is no longer running for office.

So Congress required presidents in the Presidential $1 Coin Program to have been dead for at least two years, providing a cooling-off period before the Mint begins polishing anyone’s reputation.  The idea was to honor presidents only after history had begun assessing them, rather than letting current popularity, party control, or presidential vanity determine whose face appeared in Americans’ pockets.

So, it might surprise you to learn that President Trump’s image is going to be on the new $1 coin.  He found a couple of loopholes.

Trump is not being added to the Presidential $1 Coin series created in 2005.  His coin is a separate, one-year issue authorized by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.  Therefore, the Presidential-series requirement that its subjects be dead for two years does not apply.

The anniversary law prohibits portraits of living people on the reverse of its coins—but neglects to prohibit them on the obverse.  Treasury is exploiting that distinction: Trump’s portrait is on the front, while the Presidential Seal appears on the back.  Treasury says that makes it legal (although critics contend it violates the law’s obvious intent).  The Mint has begun production, with collector rolls and bags expected in late fall 2026.

And yes—there will be lawsuits.  And lawyers will mention Clark and Coolidge and the difference between obverse and reverse sides.  You have been warned.

JumpStart: How to Tax the Golden Goose, Then Wonder Why It Moved Across the Lake

There is a certain type of city government that looks at a successful private economy the way my cat looks at unattended fried chicken.  It does not think, “How did this get here?” It thinks, “How much of this can I eat before anyone notices?”

Seattle’s JumpStart payroll tax is a fine example of the genre.

JumpStart was sold as a progressive tax on big corporations with highly-paid employees.  It passed in 2020 and targeted large employers with big Seattle payrolls and workers earning above high compensation thresholds.  The theory was simple: Seattle had rich companies, rich workers, and not enough money for housing, homelessness, climate programs, and various other progressive civic ornaments.  Therefore, Seattle would tax the payroll of the successful firms and use the money to do good things.

This is the sort of idea that sounds marvelous in a city council chamber, where money arrives as “revenue,” not as something previously owned by someone else.

Katie Wilson, now Seattle’s mayor, was not some innocent passerby, who wandered into this mess carrying a sandwich board.  Her own campaign material says she played a “key role in designing and passing” the JumpStart payroll expense tax.  Seattle Magazine likewise described her as having played an instrumental role in designing and passing it.  So this is not a case of Mayor Wilson inheriting an alien machine from a previous civilization and wondering what all the smoke is about.  She helped build the machine. 

At first, the machine produced money…Lots of it.  JumpStart generated hundreds of millions of dollars, which allowed supporters to declare victory.  This is the standard first act in a tax drama.  Politicians pass a tax, money comes in, and everyone applauds as if they have discovered fire.

The second act begins when the people being taxed notice and in Seattle, they did notice.  More importantly, they noticed Bellevue.

Bellevue sits just across the city line—incorporated, convenient, and waiting.  As Seattle began taxing employers through JumpStart, some of those employers discovered that moving just beyond Seattle’s reach was not exactly a moonshot.  In less than six years since JumpStart was implemented, Bellevue’s city population has grown by only about 2,300 people, but the community has added more than 10,000 jobs and roughly 4,000,000 square feet of office space.  In other words, the people did not necessarily move, but the payrolls sure as hell did.

Seattle’s problem is that its tax was aimed at exactly the people and companies most able to leave.  A small restaurant owner cannot move his lunch counter to Bellevue without actually moving his life.  Amazon, Microsoft contractors, tech teams, consultants, software divisions, and professional-service firms are another matter.  Their workers do not need to be chained to a particular block of downtown Seattle.  They need laptops, managers, conference rooms, fiber optic cables, and nearby coffee.  Bellevue has all of those, plus the added virtue of not being Seattle.

Bellevue is not Mars: it is just across Lake Washington.  If Seattle makes it more expensive to employ highly-paid workers inside Seattle, a rational company does not need to issue a dramatic press release titled, “Goodbye, Ungrateful City.”  It simply lets leases expire, shifts teams, places new hires elsewhere, and tells the HR department to update the office map…which appears to be exactly the pattern.  Amazon is still in Seattle, but its Seattle headcount has fallen from its peak, while its Bellevue headcount has risen.  Broader reporting has described Bellevue as a major tech alternative to Seattle, with companies are citing taxes, downtown conditions, and quality-of-life issues as part of the attraction. 

Meanwhile, downtown Seattle’s office market has looked less like a triumphant progressive revenue laboratory and more like a partially abandoned corporate aquarium.  Axios reported that downtown Seattle’s central business district vacancy reached 30%, with availability at 34%.  The Wall Street Journal, summarizing the Bellevue boom, described prime Seattle office vacancy at 34.6%, the highest for a large city in the nation.

An analysis backed by Downtown Seattle Association says downtown Seattle lost roughly 30,000 jobs and that taxable office-building value fell dramatically, while Bellevue gained jobs and saw commercial values rise.  Since that is an advocacy-backed report, we should not treat it as holy scripture chiseled onto stone tablets.  But the general direction is not hard to believe.  Tax mobile jobs and some of the mobile jobs move. 

Let us put numbers on this.

If Seattle loses 30,000 jobs, and we assume an average compensation of only $100,000, that is:

30,000 × $100,000 = $3 billion in annual payroll.

If these are high-end tech and professional jobs, the real number could easily be much higher.  Even at the conservative figure, that is $3 billion a year in wages no longer circulating downtown in the same way.  That means fewer lunches, fewer coffee runs, fewer dry-cleaning tickets, fewer happy hours, fewer parking receipts, fewer office leases, fewer business-service contracts, fewer transit trips, and fewer reasons for the next company to locate there.

The office-value loss is even more dramatic.  If downtown office values fall by $10 billion, that is not just a sad day for landlords wearing expensive shoes.  It is a destruction of taxable wealth, collateral value, construction incentive, investment appetite, and long-term urban confidence.  Property-tax systems can disguise the loss for a while by shifting burdens and adjusting rates, but they cannot make dead office value rise from the grave by passing a resolution.

Then comes the truly comic part.  JumpStart was originally sold as dedicated money for housing, homelessness, climate, and equitable development.  But once the city got used to the money, it started using it to plug ordinary budget holes.  Axios reported that Seattle redirected $287 million in 2025 and $223 million in 2026 from JumpStart’s intended uses into general-fund needs. 

Let us add that:

$287 million + $223 million = $510 million.

That is more than half a billion dollars shifted into the general city budget because the city needed the money elsewhere.  In plain English: the tax that was supposed to fund special progressive priorities not only became a crutch for ordinary city spending but also created larger deficits.

And the hole is not gone.

Recent projections show Seattle facing deficits of $175 million in 2027, $164 million in 2028, and $149 million in 2029. 

Add those together:

$175 million + $164 million + $149 million = $488 million.

So Seattle has already shifted about $510 million of JumpStart money into general revenue for 2025 and 2026 and is looking at another $488 million in projected deficits from 2027 through 2029.

That gives us:

$510 million + $488 million = $998 million.

Call it a one-billion-dollar problem, give or take the usual municipal rounding error, which in Seattle seems to be measured in endangered coffee shops.

This is the great irony.  JumpStart was supposed to be a way to make big business pay for Seattle’s ambitions.  Instead, Seattle has become dependent on the tax while the new tax erodes the tax base, making income  less dependable.  And this will only get worse every year.

The city may have gotten the first check, but it seems to have lost the account.

The defenders of JumpStart can still point to money raised, which is true, but it is also something any robber can do.  The question is not whether the city raised money, but it is whether the city’s new tax is chasing off other revenue.  If the tax helped encourage highly-paid jobs, office demand, business investment, and future growth to migrate across the lake, then Seattle did not harvest wealth.  It harvested and ate their seed corn.

That is the part progressive tax designers so often miss.  Capital is not a statue, jobs are not fence posts, and payrolls are not geological formations:   they all move and adapt. Worse yet, they flee quietly—often without leaving a forwarding address.

JumpStart may have been a success in the narrowest possible bookkeeping sense: it produced revenue.  But since the price is a weaker downtown, emptier offices, fewer high-value jobs, lower property values, and a city budget still staring at nearly half a billion dollars in future deficits, then perhaps the name was more honest than intended.

The program actually did “jump-start” something.

It’s just apparently not Seattle.