Here's a metaphor for the ages

Because officials don’t know how many of the 1.1 billion bills include the flaw, they have to hold them in the massive vaults until they are able to develop a mechanized system that can sort out the usable bills from the defects.

Sorting such a huge quantity of bills by hand, the officials estimate, could take between 20 and 30 years. Using a mechanized system, they think they could sort the massive pile of bills, each of which features the familiar image of Benjamin Franklin on the face, in about one year.

The defective bills – which could number into the tens of millions, potentially representing billions of dollars in face value – will have to be burned, they say. American taxpayers have already spent an enormous amount of money to print the bills.

According to a person familiar with the matter, the bills are the most costly ever produced, with a per-note cost of about 12 cents – twice the cost of a conventional bill. That means the government spent about $120 million to produce bills it can’t use. On top of that, it is not yet clear how much more it will cost to sort the existing horde of hundred dollar bills.

The comment, of course, covers a multitude of current issues and government actions. But, still: Didn't they run tests??

it would still be a very expensive fuckup, but given the housing bubble, going to war over WMD that didn't exist, the inability to guard against 9/11 despite a Presidential security briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", the endless war in Afghanistan, the meltdown, the failure to investigate or prosecute Bush and Wall Street criminality, the "throw trillions at banksters" bailouts, the implosion of the Democratic party, the brazen sellout on healthcare, the new bubbles in stocks and commodities, leaving the real economy to twist slowly in the wind, and, of course, the massive and multiple frauds of foreclosuregate, this is not only expectable but, as you say, a metaphor for our kleptocratic elites. They have become so incompetent they can't even print correctly the money they intend to steal.

get into the entire run? I did work for a printing company that did foodstamp coupon books for the government, among other things. The requirements were endlessly, exhaustively detailed. The test samples took forever to get scrutinized.

But ok, let's say all that happened. Then I could see if you have one batch with paper that results in this vertical crease. But the likelyhood that that defect is going to exist on every run? So all or most the paper was bad and wasn't checked? This seems not likely. If the paper was the problem, there would most likely be one batch of bad paper - not too hard to find. It's a pretty safe assumption that they would know which batch of paper created which bills (they're all numbered). Another way to get a vertical crease on all those batches would be for the equipment used to cause the defect - which makes more sense that you'd see the defect nearly all the time. This would make it very likely to be seen during testing.

Net - it seems really unlikely that the described defect is in the whole batch or spread randomly throughout the run. Could the problem instead be related to some of the new security measures and they don't want to really describe it? Seems more likely. Am I just overly paranoid now? I don't believe anything I hear anymore. At any rate, until they figure out the cause of the problem, they aren't going to be able to estimate how bad it is or if it's limited to part of the run.

What is so odd and inexplicable about all this is that any errors should have been caught at multiple points in the process, and they should have been caught in testing or early in the runs. So the screwups are both massive and serial.

Mad Fold-In Bill?

I think one of the most valuable American stamps is one with the airplane upside down. Treasury could auction off a limited number of these to collectors and make up a little of the loss.