Reagan's multi-trillion dollar bill
Last week, Congresscritter Patrick McHenry (R-SC) proposed a bill (announcement, text) that would replace Grant with Reagan on the $50 bill. Like the clowns from the Reagan Legacy Project who want to "memorialize the spirit and achievements of the nation's greatest president," inexplicably believing that Ronald Wilson Reagan was that president, this latest attempt follows a string of excessive memorializations: the DC airport, an enormous office building, and a supercarrier.
The GOP version of fiscal discipline touted by Reagan's acolytes has plenty of talk about responsibility, but consists mostly of top-heavy tax cuts and bloated Pentagon spending. Dick Cheney claimed in 2002 that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," (Ron Suskind, http://www.amazon.com/Price-Loyalty-George-Education-ONeill/dp/0743255453/ The Price of Loyalty, p. 291) but only a variant of that statement is true: Republican deficits don't matter to Republicans. (For example, the endless caterwauling over deficits that erupted as soon as the Obama administration could be blamed for Bush's economic mess.)
Rush Limbaugh once claimed (unironically) that Reagan is "a man to whom we Americans owe a debt that we will never be able to repay." (Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, p. 126) A full tally of Reaganism's effects is beyond my accounting capabilities, but a quick-and-dirty estimate with this handy Inflation Calculator shows us that Reagan's share of our national debt, which is nearing $12.5 trillion thanks to three decades of mostly conservative economic mismanagement, is approximately $3.4 trillion.
We should issue $50 IOUs with Reagan's face on them, which would be far more appropriate for his fiscal legacy: tripling the national debt while never submitting a balanced budget. Anyone who wants to "honor" his profligacy could purchase a $50 Reagan IOU at face value from the Treasury, but it won't be legal tender--that way, his admirers could do their part to erase the debt that they were so enthusiastic about creating in the first place.