Since most of LEO’s readership is either (1) too young or (2) too high to remember America’s 40th president, the news that a Republican congressman wants to put The Gipper’s deflated, astrology-and-jellybeans-filled head on the $50 bill might not mean much to you, since young’ish stoners rarely come across any bill higher than a twenty for most of their adult life.

However, a vast majority of (older, less high) Americans have rejected the idea of replacing Ulysses “Da Reconstructionist” Grant with Ronald “Raygun” Reagan, according to a new Marist poll released last week.

A Republican congressman from North Carolina has proposed legislation that would replace the image of President Ulysses S. Grant on the fifty dollar bill with that of President Ronald Reagan. Do Americans want this change to occur?

Most do not.  79% think this suggestion is a bad idea while 12% say it’s a good one.  9% are unsure.

Reagan is the modern day hero of many Republicans, but even more than seven in ten members of the nation’s GOP — 71% — believe the switch is a bad idea.  83% of Democrats and 79% of independents agree.

I was actually worried there for a few seconds that the past two decades of Regan-induced revisionist history would whitewash the ugliness of an administration that — in case you missed it — shifted the tax burden from the country’s wealthiest to its middle-class, over-leveraged our borrowing capacities less than a decade before the Cold War ended (which had little to do with him anyway) and created the foundation of our modern day, deregulated corporate oligarchy.

But this isn’t to say there’s no place in our legal tender for the visage of a man who gassed California student protesters and starred in movies with chimpanzees.

That’s what the $3 bill is for.