Thoughts:
- Resources are in general scarce and limit economic activity. You are not living in a post-scarcity world because you are constantly running into limited oil, limited aluminum, limited corn, an so on. The technology to fabricate everything everyone wants may exist, but there aren't enough raw materials to run the nano forges at anything remotely close to capacity.
- With industrial capacity running at some low percentage of utilization all the time, unemployment is crazy high all the time. People talk about the "employment rate" - the literal percentage of people who have a job. It's like Africa is now, where actual labor utilization is like 20% and people are reselling things to each other on the street or just walking around looking for odd jobs that need doing.
- The United States had a political collapse at the federal level. It was brought on by a combination of political gridlock and spiraling unemployment reducing the financial solvency of the federal government. And the federal government is just plain gone. That means no one is guarantying the American Dollar and greenbacks are no longer currency.
- Each region in the former United States considers itself to be "The United States" for the most part. However, with the "real" federal government gone decades in the past, local governments speak for the US in absentia - like how Taiwan used to claim they spoke for the entirety of China.
- The US Mints are all still issuing dollars, they just are doing so in the name of treasurers appointed locally. So different regions are in large part determined by which new dollars people have. The mints are in the places they actually are: Washington DC; Philadelphia, Fort Knox, Kentucky; West Point, New York; San Francisco; and Denver. These are the sources of money and the default capitals of the new organizational regions.
- ...Except the places that actually have quasi-seceded, which are Utah, the Lone Star Republic, and Florida. Utah and Texas have made their secessionist ambitions pretty clear, ad need no further elaboration. Florida is now in federation with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and a couple other Caribbean islands.
- ...And places that are low enough population that it doesn't make sense to deliver mail or provide currency at all: like Montana, which are just lawless zones like the Fallout wilderness, where people barter with bullets and fuel.
And people will regard currency from Kentucky as foreign or even counterfeit if you try to spend it in the Denver zone.
-Username17