NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Reno County State Rep. Michael Murphy is backing a bill to allow for physical precious metals to pay for items in Kansas.
"We're the first to be moving forward through the committee process," Murphy said. "Florida, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma's working on one, Tennessee's working on one. I think eleven states have made gold and silver legal tender. That mostly is a tax issue, because gold and silver typically is considered property. If you sell it, you get gains. It also becomes taxable for property tax and things like that. When you make it legal tender, that takes that off. You can't take a gold coin or a silver coin in to buy groceries or gas or whatever like that. The idea behind this is, there's new technology that has come around in the last five years that allows us to have a depository."
Murphy currently uses one overseas, but he'd like to see one in Kansas.
"This is actually working and I actually use it," Murphy said. "There's a depository in Switzerland and there's a company named Glint, that you can get a debit card from them and you buy gold and it goes into the depository. You don't have to buy like an ounce. You don't have to buy any specific amount of gold, you buy it by how much money you want to put in. You can buy as little as one cent worth of gold. If you want to buy five dollars, $20, $100, $ 1 million, whatever, you can do that. That sits in the depository. This is not paper, it's actual gold. Then, when you need to go buy gas, groceries, pay rent, whatever like that, you can use that debit card and it will deduct whatever amount that is."
If passed, the depository would be overseen by the Kansas State Treasurer.
"The idea behind doing it at the state level is allowing people to be able to do that, number one, in our country, number two, within our state, number three, with this federal government, I don't care what party you're in, they are both spending money like drunken sailors, no offense to drunken sailors," Murphy said. "It's a crazy $1.5 to $2 trillion of deficit spending a year. We're over $34 trillion now. If you subscribe to modern monetary theory, you think there's nothing wrong with that. If you understand history, you know nobody's ever been able to do that before. We're running ourselves into a big problem."
No action was taken after the hearing.
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