Counterfeiting is on the rise again. Big surprise. All that high-tech reworking of the currency is meaningless when people don’t pay attention to their money.
The penalty for being found with counterfeiting materials should be death; it’s too easy to get out of a 20-year term in the slammer (first offense, time off for good behaviour, etc). If you can’t give them death, then loss of citizenship and lifetime banishment to Antarctica might suffice.
No country should tolerate people screwing around with its money.
(In particular, I can’t believe this chick in NYC who passed the counterfeit $5 bill she got from someone else because she “[did]n’t want to lose it [the money]”. How patriotic of you, Miss. Think about that five bucks the next time a defense appropriations bill comes up and gets trimmed because there’s not enough money to go around. And then think about that again in the millisecond or so you’ll have when a nuke goes off in NYC because it wasn’t detected or interdicted.)
A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)