PSCOT — Jay Pscot, Author and Publisher

The work of Jay Pscot

Write.
Release.
Repeat.

Books, novellas, short stories, articles and more — gathered in a library built for ideas rather than shelves.

Browse the library

Start with a view.
Refine the results.

Choose a prepared view, or clear it and build your own. Tags, authors, and series are cumulative: every selection narrows the results.

Selected filters
Browse all tags

Format

Genre

Subject

Custom view

2 works

It Is Time to Finish the Job
Article

It Is Time to Finish the Job

A Proposal to Modernize American Currency

By Jay Pscot

The United States has always changed its money reluctantly, and for most of two centuries that reluctance has been a virtue. Currency works because people trust it, recognize it without thinking, and know instinctively what to do with it. A system that changes constantly forfeits all three. But a system that never changes stops being a design and becomes an accumulation of historical accidents, and American coinage passed that point some time ago.

In 2025 the U.S. Mint suspended production of circulating pennies after more than 230 years. The arithmetic had become impossible to defend: the Mint reported a production and distribution cost of 3.02 cents for a one-cent coin, and projected roughly $56 million a year in reduced material costs from stopping. Nothing was confiscated and nothing was invalidated. Existing pennies remain legal tender, they remain in circulation, and they will keep turning up in drawers and pockets for years. What ended was the manufacture of new ones for ordinary commerce.

That decision is usually described as the retirement of an obsolete coin, which undersells it. It is the first official admission in living memory that a denomination can outlive its purpose. Having made that admission about the penny, the country has no principled reason to stop there.

A more rational system is available.
View details
The Consolidated Constitution
Article

The Consolidated Constitution

We the people, in plain English.

By Jay Pscot

The United States is governed by three documents that were written across two centuries, in three different registers of English, by people who never sat in the same room. Reading them together is hard. Later amendments silently overrule earlier text without ever quoting it; a clause about counting people for representation sits in Article One while the amendment that rewrote it sits three pages away and eighty years later.
This is one attempt to put them back together. Every operative sentence in the founding law appears here exactly once, in modern American English, in the place where it actually does its work. The Sixteenth Amendment sits inside the taxing power. The Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth sit inside the presidency. The Bill of Rights is kept whole and named, because it is read and cited as a unit. Everything else has been folded into the body.
This is not the law. It is a reading of the law. Courts apply the original words, not these. Where the original is ambiguous, a plain-English version has to pick a meaning — and picking is an argument. Every place this text picks, it says so in a footnote, gives the authority for the choice, and gives you the strongest case against it. The original wording sits underneath every section, one click away, so you can check the work.
View details Read