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Is It Time For the US To Ditch the Dollar Bill?
coondoggie writes "It seems well past time that the U.S. ditch its $1 bill — considering such a move could save the country somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion. But there is much resistance, or perhaps a lack of real consideration of the issue from most people. Watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this week testified before a Congressional hearing on the topic, and said dollar coins could save $4.4 billion over 30 years (PDF), or an average of about $146 million per year."
Dollar coins at the strip club sounds both dangerous and hilarious.
Not gonna happen; we still have pennies, for chrissakes!
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
I'm thinking about them right now .....
So that's $146,000,000/yr.
Does the projection for the future savings take inflation into account?
How about the penny first.
It seems like everything in the US takes forever to accomplish. Everything changed when the internet came to be. We can do things now in seconds that used to take days. The governing system needs to learn a thing or two from this. However, Canada gave up the dollar bill a long long time ago, and soon we're getting rid of the penny. It seems more and more like we're the real leaders in North America now.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
If we get rid of dollar bills, how am i supposed to pay my girls their allowance every two weeks?
And no, this isn't a euphemism for a visit to a strip club. i have two daughters. They earn an allowance.
No stripper is worth a $5 tip to watch them on stage.
sudo make me a sandwich
Please for to abadon the penny!
How about this! If we took the power away from a bunch of secret bank mobsters to PRINT MONEY and instead backed it with gold or some other finite, precious commodity, the dollar would retain its value.
I'm sick and tired of this implicit tax that I have just because I *HOLD* a dollar. Read Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" essay. Once it's started, that money which is printed out can only be repaid by printing more money. This is the shabby key to the (corporate/social) welfare state that exists today.
i cant remember a time where anything ever cost less than a dollar once tax is included. and honestly, if stores did a decent job of not charging pennies then we wouldnt need those either
Start with the penny
Here in Europe it is widespread belief that the fact that 1 and 2 euros are in coins are a reason for inflation. You think twice before spending a bill, while psychologically a coin is easier to part with.
It does happen quite often to have 10-20eur in coins so it's probably not all wrong.
In fact, we should ditch the five dollar bill as well. One and five dollar denomination coins, possibly even adding a two dollar denomination, wouldn't be a bad thing. It'd be effectively mirroring what exists in other countries and would save a considerable amount of money printing bills that barely last 18 months as it is, replacing them with coins that last decades.
I think the only hard thing would be finding a metal that isn't worth more per weight (I'm guessing Zinc is still cheap) than the coin stamped into it. Or we could look into other alloys and materials (carbon fiber coins anyone?) Maybe do like other countries and start punching holes in them.
What are we expected to do, tip with coins? Purchase tickets of some kind?
I suggest we move to a system built on barter and bitcoins.
Maybe the US can start there then more onto the metric system.
Really, subject says it all. I sometimes get cash out of the ATM, just because I like to have some on hand. The great thing about cash is that if you end up in a bad position, anyone anywhere will accept it. I got to thinking about it the other day though, and I'm kind of surprised they don't record they serial number of the bills they dispense to you and track where they end up in order to better track purchases that go under the radar because there's no 'card trail'.
Not that I WANT this, mind you, but from a marketing point of view, the most interesting demographic has got to be the one that is trying it's damned to prevent you from finding out about it.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Wait, they're saying we can save potentially billions of dollars, by simply changing our expectations and habits in a very slight and non-destructive fashion? Unless we can declare war on it as some kind of abstract ideological concept, nobody's going to go for that. This is America, dude, where we turn off the lights when we leave the bathroom to save the environment while we let petroleum producers dump thousands of tonnes of oil into the water because they half-assed the construction and bypassed most of the safety procedures. We come in peace, ignore the Predator drones.
The only sensible way to do this is to shove it down the average person's throat with them screaming bloody murder... only to find out a few years later that they actually like it better the new way. It's how things have always been done here. Don't ask me why, I don't know whether it's human nature, or there's something in the water that makes people this resistant to beneficial change, but will happily make useless changes to everything...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That's all there is to this comment. I throw away pennies. The only coins I save are quarters, and I only do that out of frustration. I don't carry a coin pouch. Seriously.
I dont want to carry around a bunch of change just for a can of coke or a candy bar.
There is a vast weight difference in the 2.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... keep the penny
We should just strike a zero from the coins and keep the dollar. In other words, the pennies sitting in your piggy would immediately be worth $0.10. Paper money and the existing dollar coins would keep the same value, just multiply the value of all the other coins.
1. Really not that expensive compared to the national debt.
2. It would be a form of stimulus that goes to middle class people with jars full of coins, not fat cats. It would spark the kind of spending they want to stimulate, just in time for Christmas.
3. The mint would once again be making money minting pennies and nickles instead of losing it. In the long run it would pay for itself. As an added bonus, you don't need to change the minting process.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
We can't even get rid of the penny. How are we going to get rid of paper dollar bills first?
I saw this insightful comment and will post it here.
How about this! If we took the power away from a bunch of secret bank mobsters to PRINT MONEY and instead backed it with gold or some other finite, precious commodity, the dollar would retain its value.
I'm sick and tired of this implicit tax that I have just because I *HOLD* a dollar. Read Greenspan's "Gold and Economic Freedom" essay. Once it's started, that money which is printed out can only be repaid by printing more money. This is the shabby key to the (corporate/social) welfare state that exists today.
The reference is here: http://www.321gold.com/fed/greenspan/1966.html
Planet Money did a whole podcast on this. Don't see anyone linking to it, so here's the most current thing:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
The short is: switching to dollar coins is both less convenient and more expensive than sticking with bills. It's surprising, given the much longer lifetime of coins, but unambiguous.
Up north we have 1$ and 2$ coins and its really NOT an issue. Time to get over the "no way, not ever, coins are icky" attitude and do the responsible thing to save money.
Honestly, something has to be done to reduce government expenditure and this is a simple, no brainer way to go about it.
No sig here...
average of about $146 million per year
It may not sound like much but for that amount of money we could afford more than a third of an Apple CEO every year.
They've been through this before. There's a relevant Planet Money story about this.
The short version is that people tend to hoard coins whereas they tend to spend bills. This means the government would have to have more coins in circulation than if they were using bills. They ran the numbers and concluded that it would actually cost more to replace all dollar bills with dollar coins.
I'd be very happy if we did away with the bills and went to strictly $1 coins. In fact, I'd also be happy to see us ditch the penny from circulation and perhaps go as far as to say start making $5 coins with the eventual goal to eliminate the $5 bill.
Think of all the public healthcare that could be funded with that money!
You now have our socalized healthcare, now be able to afford it as well by adopting 1 & 2 dollar coins just like Canada, in fact, skip a step, and delete pennies at the same time.
You know what prevented the US from making this happen last time (Sacajawea dollar coin) was the fact that your banks didn't have the balls to pull the notes, and the government didn't have enough reach to do so.
On second thought you should move to our socialized, government sanctioned banks at the same time as well.
You know cause if you want something done either pay a shizzle ton of money for it (capitalism) or get a government to mandate it.
Countdown too some Tea Party drooler doing their best Mel Gibson "...but you cant take our FREEDOM" tirade to shout down the potential savings.
Dollar bills are horrible for vending machines. About half of the bills in my wallet are in questionable condition, and most aren't even a decade old. Meanwhile, I have have a couple of coins in my pocket that are from the 1950s and 60s. Still perfectly good.
The two dollar bill never really took off in the US. Supposedly some people find them unlucky. Dump 'em for a $2 coin. Works for Canada.
If you really want to get bold, move the currency from two decimal places to one (coins would be $0.1, $0.2 and $0.5). The penny has less real value today than the half-penny had in its day when it was dropped. Sure, we could just round to the nearest nickle to keep 5Â and 25Â pieces good, but we're almost to a point where it costs more to mint a nickle than what its face value is.
So, $146M in savings for a year-- will that even pay for the Congress critter hearings? Why is this even in front of Congress? Shouldn't this be a question for the Treasury Department. Repub's want "hand's off, small, efficient government" -- they let the Treasury Dept make the decision -- if you want them to behave like a business then let them tend to their business. I'm also willing to bet that Treas has a better grasp on ramifications w.r.t. counterfitting than Congress. Bunch a PHB's....
Sometimes ya gotta let people do their work.
We should abolish all change below the dime, and turn the one and five into coins.
Why are we talking about 4 billion in 30 years? What about a per year rate? It's like when the politicians talk about deficit reduction. They come out an throw out a number of a couple hundred billion and only later you find out they mean "over 7 years." What about next year?
4 billion is an exciting number until you understand that it's over nearly half a human's life span.
Planet Money did an analysis of the issue awhile back, and discovered that the habit of people to let coins collect in jars & drawers, while it would benefit the government, would alter the math and not end up saving us if we made the switch.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/19/150976150/should-we-kill-the-dollar-bill
Not yet, because nobody wants them.
This isn't news. They made the same argument in 1979, with the "Susan B. Anthony" which nobody used; and in 2000 with the "Sacagawea dollar", which nobody used.
http://consumerist.com/2012/11/30/if-no-one-likes-the-dollar-coin-why-is-the-u-s-government-trying-to-push-it-so-hard/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
How do I carry dollar coins in my wallet, again? The dollar used to be worth something, so you could carry a handful of mixed change (including silver and gold $1, 3, 5, 10, and 20) to use during the day. I guess that eliminating the $1 bill is a tacit admission that is it worthless and not worth carrying.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
According to Wolfram Alpha, $1 in 1950 had the approximate purchasing power of $9.54 today. So the dollar is the new dime. Pop quiz: did it make sense to print ten-cent notes in 1950? (Hint: no) Then why retain the $1 bill today?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The $1 bill is useful for everyday transactions, the $100 bill is useful for gamblers in Las Vegas and drug dealers. While I have no problem with the former, making it more difficult for drug dealers to do business seems like a good policy. Also, it would be two fewer bills that we would have to worry about people counterfeiting.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Having lived briefly in Canada I must say dollar coins are *highly annoying* and being a male with a wallet (instead of a woman with a purse where she can keep a coin holder) makes it even more annoying. I would arrive home from work and dump all the coins in a recipient and keep them there. You end up using $1 and $2 coins only to do laundry. It's a pain to carry that stuff around.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/19/150976150/should-we-kill-the-dollar-bill
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
Even the GAO admitted that the plan to replace dollar bills with dollar coins would pretty much just be seigniorage. The government would make a profit on dollar coins from lack of use, not any actual savings.
We've tried several. The big problem is that the Treasury won't simply ditch the dollar bill in favor of coins. They try to issue the coins along with dollar bills, so of course people treat the coins as collectibles instead of currency and they never catch on.
The right way to do it is to just do it: issue the coins and stop issuing dollar bills. Bills would still be in circulation and accepted, but no new $1 bills would be issued to banks. If a bank orders $1s, it'd receive them in coins. Any dollar bills received by the Federal Reserve banks or the Treasury would be destroyed, and any replacement would be done with coins. I figure within a year we'd be on coins completely, most dollar bills would've been returned as worn and destroyed and with no new bills being issued coins would become so prevalent that they wouldn't be collectibles anymore.
And get rid of pennies, too.
It was a dumb idea when they issued the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
It was a dumb idea when they issued the Sacagawea dollar.
It's still a dumb idea.
No, it won't save anything. There are more costs to changing the currency than just the printing costs at the US Mint.
The only place I ever saw dollar coins in actual use was the Miami metrorail system.
Canada did this in 1987 for $1 bills, and 1996 for $2, and phased in the coins over a couple of years. Are they heavy and a pain? Yes and no. All it really means is that you tend not to carry around $10 in small change anymore. When something costs, say, $7, instead of handing someone a $10 and getting $2 in change all the time, you hand them a $5 and a toonie. There's never much reason to keep a lot of loonies and toonies in your pocket, and because of the weight you simply prioritize getting rid of them with each transaction that doesn't round off evenly to $5 or $10 increments. It's only if you can't do math that you let them pile up until they are a problem.
If it's going to save over $100 million a year, that seems worth a minor inconvenience.
Nearly every other economy with a unit of money roughly comparable to the US dollar has replaced their corresponding banknote with a coin. Canadian dollar. Australian dollar. United Kingdom pound. Brazilian real. New Zealand dollar. The Whole Freakin' EuroZone's euro. Swiss Franc. Countries whose money is off by a major factor have coins with roughly the value of the US dollar (e.g. Japanese yen, Russian rubles). Do you think maybe they're onto something?
US money is way overdue for an overhaul. It's time to drop the penny and the nickel, and start rounding prices to the nearest 1/10 of a dollar, which would keep the math simple. Stop printing disposable bank notes worth less than $10, and replace them with durable coins.
I'm sure that part of the psychological resistance to this comes down to two words: Washington and Lincoln. They're the two most popular presidents, and they're on three out of the four items we need to discontinue. So reassign them. Put George on the new $1 coin, and Abe on the new $5 coin. Since George is already on the quarter, move Jefferson there (from the nickel). Problem solved.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Strippers? There's probably not enough $2 bills for that market.
The revised size of the dollar coin is too close to the size of a quarter. Needs to be easily distinguished, like the ones with Eisenhower on them. No chance of mistaking that for a quarter in dim light or a hurry. That was of course one of the problems with the Susan B coins. A much smaller gold coin would also be
workable, but it must not duplicate the size of any other coin.
What is more disturbing is the constant drop in value of the dollar. Think for example that a haircut in the 1950s cost maybe 75 cents. Now it's more
like $15 and counting. The factor of ~20 is constant for most everything else, will probably grow since that's what happens when you print more money.
A dollar coin like the old Eisenhower one (even being made of the LBJ cupro-nickel alloy) might be worth enough to slightly discourage printing
money. Logically you'd want to make coins in $5, $10, $20, $50, $100 and $500 denominations too and drop paper. There are govt types who find cash
too hard to trace and would love to make it impossible to trade without leaving traces. If it's too heavy to carry, cash becomes pushed out.
Is this really desirable?
They are great at renaissance fairs!
A bag of clinking, goldish coins looks a lot more properly medieval than a wad of limp, grubby pieces of paper.
seriously?
The homeless person with the sign on the side of the road with the fake amputee limb look will get a lot more money and bruises to match.
When the U.S. first began minting our fabulous decimal currency, the lowest denomination—the half-penny—was worth a little more than today's dime. Anything less than a dime represents a value so low it wasn't worth dealing with in 1792, and it certainly isn't worth dealing with now. There are many big advantages in switching to a dimes-only coinage versus any other system:
-Dimes are an established coin in American society, and an extremely light coin, making a dimes-only system an easy plan to adopt, and easy to use.
-10 dimes to a dollar, not much is simpler than that. Any transaction would only require between 0 and 9 dimes, and only using a single coin makes counting a much simpler process.
-Rather than rounding to nickels like Australia, we can simply get rid of that pesky second decimal place. E.g. $9.5
There are a thousand arguments for other systems, and this is an arbitrary idea. But I would argue it's the cleanest arbitrary idea we've got. The dime is inefficient, and the dollar bill is inefficient, but these problems pale in comparison to the clusterfuck cause by the penny, the nickel, and everything else. The true primary hurdles would be solved by:
-Making dimes out of zinc, to appease the stupid zinc lobby.
-Putting Lincoln on it.
Then, a hundred years from now, that god we trust in willing, we ditch the dime for the dollar coin.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
As long as there are "illuminaty" signs on the coin to keep the tinfoil folks happy... And one can roll it up to snort ehmm medicine, to keep the party people happy... I am happy...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
I would rather keep the $1 bill and get rid of all the coins. Put an end to all the $0.99 nonsense pricing and make taxes/tips easier to calculate. I don't even mind if they make it so all sales taxes round up to the nearest dollar. I'm tired of trying to find an efficient way to store and, later, spend coins. They weigh my pants down and cause the pockets to wear out sooner.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Is it really worth the hassle to go through all of the changes necessary when more and more transactions are being carried out electronically? There are a lot of changes that would have to be put into place to get dollar coins more convenient, vending machines being the first that jumps into my mind. At a time when our economy is moving sluggishly forward, wouldn't it make more sense to maintain the status quo and once things have actually rebounded then spring all these costs of change onto our businesses.
Though I guess the hidden benefit is that the salvation army will likely see their donations increase.
hey.. if they switch to dollar coins, we can all be like link.... go out and get yourself a bigger bag for your coins.
If lack of coins stopped people from downing cans of soda and candy bars, they might enjoy the resulting vast weight difference. :-)
Meanwhile, we should be cutting way more than 4 billion from the DoD and transferring it *all* to NASA.
But let's talk about what dollar bills we should or should not be printed instead. You know, for reasons.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
If you want to do it you have to go cold turkey. Just like other countries have done. Stop printing $1 bills, start issuing $1 coins. Done.
In the 20th Century in Canada we ditched $0.25, $1 and $2 notes in favour of coins, and ditched $1000 notes entirely. The last series of 25 cent notes were dated 1923, withdrawn by the Bank of Canada with the 1935 series, BTW.
...laura
For anyone wondering where all the Sacajawea dollars went to, they are mostly in Ecuador. Ecuador uses US dollars as the currency, and people there use dollar coins all the time. You can see some photos of dirty tarnished dollar coins that have obviously been used, which is unheard of in the US.
I don't have a problem with this, but I almost never carry cash. It's always an after thought with a 'Oh, hmm, they may only take cash at the parking garage'. I'm surprised sometimes how people who complain about carrying coins, carry so much paper money. If it's a hassel use your check card which is the same as cash. Although if you are the tin foil hat type, then you have a whole litany of why you won't.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
..when they drop inches, Fahrenheit, SUVs, bipartisan politics, Creationism, buying on credit, pork barrelling, guns, corn syrup, jingoism, Hollywood and voting machines.
If we were living in glorious economic health a plan to change currencies would not attract so much fear and loathing. But right now the public is half out of their minds with woes and miseries and any changes to currency would be met with howling hatred and endless accusations.
I don't mind having 30 or 40 one dollar bills in my pocket, but I think I'd have a problem with 30 - 40 1$ coins !!
that's over 2 pounds of metal pulling my pants down around my ass. No Thanks!
What about the paper cash only vending machines? I see this being a big problem with them when people are going to be forced to always put in $5+ just to get a small item. They will run out of spare money really fast.
http://interserver.net/
Unfortunately, we already tried doing this - but the ingenious government concluded 3 1/2 days after the release of the Sacajawea dollar coin that people "Just saw them as a rarity, and were squirilling them away (rather than recirculating them)" - so what did they do? Stopped producing them, as *that* would solve this issue!
This of course, was after a lot of people spent a lot of their money retrofitting vending machines to use the new currency.
So - no - now the Government (assuming they can figure out if it's going to *cost* or *save* money) - is going to do it again? And want's people to retrofit their machines over to the *new* system???
Sure...they'll go for that...
Exactly. Here's some reading for you.
Link
I use them. Way easier to keep a bunch in the ash tray to pay tolls with.
What, they don't have easypass in your state? Tell them to join the 21st century.
People would use them if they stopped printing dollar bills.
But why should the government want to make their money heavy, bulky, and more inconvenient? To encourage people to switch over to Mastercard and Visa?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Whenever I travel in countries with high-value coins, I hate it! I do not want $1, $2, $5 coins jangling around in my pocket.
the dollar bill? how about the penny!?!?
We've tried several. The big problem is that the Treasury won't simply ditch the dollar bill in favor of coins.
No. The problem is that every coin that has been tried has been massively less convenient than a note in the quantity that $1 units are carried.
1) Eisenhower Dollar: Practically speaking, before my time, but anyone who has seen one knows that they are god-awfully huge and totally impractical for daily use.
2) Susan B Anthony Dollar: Visibly so similar to a quarter than humans and machines have problems. They are very heavy. You don't want to have more than a couple in your wallet.
3) Sacagawea dollar: more visibly distinct but still easily confused in dim light and just as heavy. Getting change for a $20 in Sacagawea dollars is still a horror.
A viable dollar coin needs to be visibly and tacitly distinct from any other coin. It also needs to be light enough than ten of them can be carried without noticeable inconvenience. Perhaps something like the Australian $2 coin. It it small, distinctively thick and surprisingly light. Come to think of it, that might the trick. Abolish the $1 note and create a $2 coin. It wouldn't have to be quite as light if you only needed to carry half as many.
When the US introduced the Sacagawea dollar in 2000, it ran TV commercials encouraging people to use it.
However, people don't choose their forms of money. They get from the ATM, mostly $20 bills, or from other sources whatever denominations they get. It is the stores that decide whether to stock $1 bills or coins. So, it isn't a question of popular acceptance, it is a question of what stores choose to give out in change.
Not only would the USA save lots of money by not printing dollar bills or pennies - but the clothing manufactures could make some money by adding better pockets to all pants. "Stronger pockets for all that gold.®"
Twice the buying power, same amount of paper!
Seriously, I don't see the dollar coin being a success, but I DO see $2 bills being accepted if - and only if - $1 bills are made artificially scarce AND bill-accepting vending machines are adapted to accept them BEFORE the "big push."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'll just mention as someone who handles money, including (by US federal mandate) a small number of dollar coins, that I see a huge desire among the vast majority of my customers to completely avoid dollar coins. They will get rid of coins the moment they get them. I received over last summer less than one dollar coin per thousand bills.
So there is this vast preference for dollar bills.
Now consider that the US is storing indefinitely somewhere around a billion dollar coins. How did they get this so wrong?
So why do dollar coins have such a big negative preference? I believe it's because of how heavy and bulky they are. They mass 8 grams compared to 1 gram for the bill. Eight times as heavy. Bulkwise the two are probably comparable in density per $. But the bill can be folded while the coin is a rigid circular shape. I don't see myself putting 25 dollar coins in my wallet any time soon.
And we see the usual rather unthinking authoritarian pattern of burdening hundreds of millions of people to save a few bucks. It's worth noting that dollar coins are currently worth as metal about 6% of their face value. If the US gets a large bout of inflation, that's going to make these coins very expensive to produce. Paper bills just don't have that problem.
I imagine I won't surprise many people by saying that I don't see a case for phasing out the dollar bill under these circumstances. Maybe if the dollar coin was much smaller, cheaper, and had a more convenient form factor with actually adoption from some portion of the public.
Coins, I might add, fit very nicely into a piggy bank and the added jingle tends to be more impressive to children.
Until you consider how expensive it's going to be for every single company out there to change their cash registers, bill scanners, etc. to handle a dollar coin. Sure, the companies themselves will pay it, but that's now a business expense. That they'll deduct from their taxes. And I'll take a bet that that writeoff will be in the billions of dollars over the next few years if it got implemented.
Look, dollar bills and the penny are here to stay, just like CDMA here in the states and left-hand driving in the UK. Squawk all you want, but it's not changing anytime soon.
The savings are over 30 years. In the first 7 years, it ends up costing $500m. This is not something that you do when you're trying to balance the budget.
if you hadn't noticed, there's a particularly loud virulent strain of "oppose all common sense progress as evil" in the USA
i know such stubborn blockheadedness isn't unique to the USA. but they seem more powerful here. how do other countries quash this loud ignorant sort?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With constant inflation, I'm pretty sure at some point the $5, $10, $20, etc bills will also stop making economic sense, which is kinda ridiculous. Maybe this is a transitional thing on the way to digital currency? Or people are thinking that with the population starting to level off that constant inflation will be less important?
We can talk getting rid of dollars after we do away with pennies.
Be seeing you...
I get so sick of hearing how this and that will save us billions of dollars, when in fact all its doing is lining the pockets of some politician, lobbyist and a private interest group.
Why don't they just focus on cutting all funding for Homeland security? It seems that every terrorist plot has been foiled by the average passenger so far. How much money would that save us??? Plus you would get the added benefit of some dude not touching your "special place" when you travel and opt out of the porno scanners.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
If you replace the one dollar bill with a scorpion then it's going to shake up most high street transactions. How much is that? $8.99? Here's ten bucks and keep the change...
What eve you gain you will mostlikley lose just from energy consumption. 1 pennie is 3 times the wheight of a dollar bill. Transporting that isnt cheap.
A lot of US made coin mechanisms in video games, vending machines etc have been taking $1 and $2 coins without any problems in Australia for well over a decade. I'd bet they don't have a special "export" mechanism and it would just be a case of changing a few switch settings to set them into a range for a new US $1 coin.
Wiki:
The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
On a side note: no, it's not time, it is way past time.
It would be nice to tell how much money I've got in my pocket when I go out drinking, without having to open a billfold and count it.
Got used to doing that in the Canadian Army and when I was in Europe.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The first warning sign is the "over 30 years". This will be based on "if things keep on keeping on". But they won't. Everyone knows that.
The second warning sign is scale. $4.4 billion over 30 years. $4.4 billion sounds like a lot. The "Average 146 million a year" almost certainly includes inflation and the associated escalating costs. That is, most of the savings will be in the last 10 of those 30 years, not the first 10. And saying "average 30 million a year over 10 years" doesn't sound anywhere nearly as impressive. *
For the US government, we're talking about a very very small impact on the annual budget.
* 30 million: figure pulled out of a hat. Do not mistake for estimate based on actual study. Use with extreme caution.
For what it's worth, US $1 coins work much better for rolling across your knuckles than US $0.25 coins do.
Who gives a sh*t about a bill, let's get rid of the useless penny.
There. Fixed it for you.
Have gnu, will travel.
Personally I hate coins and would hate for paper money to go away. Change always falls out of my pockets when I sit down. But instead of it being pennys, quarters and dimes it would quickly add up to real money. Coins add up to a heavy amount very fast and are generally annoying.
Coins worth less than a quarter. The last time a coin was removed from circulation was the half cent which, adjusted for inflation was worth a dime in today's coinage.
The US $2 bill would become a LOT more popular than it is now. Many people still mistakenly think they're collectible. Plus, we could consider printing our banknotes on polymers instead of paper. Polymer banknotes last longer than paper banknotes, which would mean less printing.
And the reason we have the loonie at all is because the weekend they shipped the stamps for the original mass market $1 coin design to the mint in Winnipeg was the weekend Winnipeg had one of its worst winter storms of the 20th century. Because of the severity of the storm and the disruption to any sort of normal transportation, they lost the stamps for the original coin design. The loonie was the backup dollar coin design. The Canadian dollar coin was originally supposed to be the traditional Voyageur design. Since the stamps went missing it would be too easy for someone to make their own coins if they fell into the wrong hands, so production was delayed and we have the loonie. (Is it counterfeiting if you are using the officials stamps? :)
When the storm was over there were two story snow banks. During the storm when people needed to go to the hospital emergency room and even when women went into labour, they sent out snowmobiles with trailers instead of ambulances, since everything was pretty much impassible in the city. I was putting myself through school working overnight at a 45 table pool hall (20 snooker tables at the time, and 25 9 ball tables). I got snowed in at the pool hall from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. Right in the downtown. Almost no-one was there except for local neighbourhood people who would drop in. Since we couldn't go home we just kept working between hands in the two day poker sessions.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
And be run by the Germans that actually know how to run things and currencies
but how much is that in dollar coins?
Replacing dollar bills with dollar coins doesn't change transaction prices, just the tokens used for the transaction. Junking the penny does change prices. (And we junked the 2c coin long long ago, and the $2 bill is around but not common.) I wouldn't mind junking pennies.
For most purposes, I hate dollar coins. The two ways I acquire the things are change from the train-ticket machines and from the post-office stamp vending machine, and in both cases I end up with a big heavy pile of metal in my pants pocket. It's too clunky to carry around, and if we had old-style silver dollars it would be even clunkier. Nothing irrational about it, the things are a lot more trouble than flat pieces of paper.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know why you want to force me to carry around a big pile of metal in my pocket instead of convenient flat paper, but I assume your reasons are irrational. As far as Congresscritters having spines goes, yes, they're well-known not to possess them, but this isn't an issue where I want Congress deciding to inconvenience me just to make you happy, and enough other people don't like dollar coins that they're not going to push it.
Some countries have gone the other direction - I was in Egypt in the mid-80s, and they had 10p and 20p banknotes in addition to coins; I think the pound was worth about US$2 at the time. They were small notes, maybe 1/4 as large as the pound note, so they were moderately convenient for making change.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They've got far more of them printed than the public wants to carry around, and they're talking about stopping minting them. I'm disappointed - I really want the Richard Nixon dollar coin to come out, and it's still scheduled for a few years away.
The old silver dollars were cool because they were actually silver, and actually worth something, and the quarter and dime coins are the same size as when they were worth that weight of silver. But now that it's all cheap metals, there's no reason that a coin is more useful than an otherwise-worthless banknote.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They're not radically different colors like the banknotes in most of the wold, but they're not all green any more, and they've moved the Dead Presidents' faces around to different parts of the front.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hating to carry a big pile of metal around in my pockets is not irrational. And a dollar now may be worth what a quarter was then, but it's bigger and clunkier, and if we replace dollar bills with coins we'll start needing a lot more $5 bills, because right now if you buy something with a $20 yuppie food coupon and the change is in $1 bills, it's ok, but getting a dozen heavy coins is really annoying (and pretty common, if you use transit fare machines or post office stamp vending machines.)
Half-pennies and 2c coins are long long gone. 1/10 cent coins were issued by many states on a not-legal-tender basis, both because nobody had money during the Depression and because they were useful for paying sales taxes before everybody decided that that was stupid and rounded off the payment thresholds.
But I've used 10p and 20p banknotes (in Egypt, in the 80s) which were in dual circulation along with coins, and they were pretty convenient. They were about 1/4 the size of a 1-pound note, which was about the size of a dollar or pound.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yarrr! You've got it exactly correct.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Killing the Penny and Nickel ... which WILL happen this year by Geithner/Obama fiat (Geithner announced it in a press conference a few days ago) is BAD for ordinary people.
Killing small coins is a way to hide inflation. Everything gets rounded up to the nearest ten cents or so, and you don't notice the constant inflation that you do when prices are dollars and cents.
Geithner/Obama, to save a massive ... $49 million*, want to do away with pennies and nickels (well they are) in 2013, and do away with dimes in 2014. Again the motivation is to hide inflation from consumers.
I like the idea of a $1 coin, a $2 coin, and a $5 coin, but don't do away with the smaller coins. The only check we have as consumers on inflation is careful shopping and refusing to buy items that constantly rise in price. A cash economy give not only privacy, but is a proven way to save (spending via cards encourages free spending by consumers) and the risk of constant hacking, not just physical card readers but intrusions at retailers, banks, and card processing businesses, make using them increasingly risky (and the risk is opaque and ill-reported to consumers).
*$50 million is what a single Obama vacation costs, fully loaded with security costs, overtime, fuel for the planes, pre-positioned limos, etc. If he was really concerned about money he could take fewer trips on the public dime, and just stay in the White House. The real reason is to hide inflation from ordinary people.
For tolls, California has been trying to force us all to use FastTrack; I'd rather not be tracked fast, thank you very much.
And for parking, most of the meters are old enough that they don't take dollar coins, and when parking fees are high enough that that's a problem, the rapidly decreasing cost of dollar-bill readers makes it economical for cities to install fancier machines that cover a bunch of parking places on the block and rip you off by not letting you use unexpired meter time if the previous person leaves early. (They're probably also more efficient about telling meter maids whether they've got expired spaces, so they don't need to look at every meter as they drive by.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Get rid of the quarter? Then how are thousands of college kids going to do laundry? Not all of us could take it home to mom every weekend.
I heard thats where its at.
1987 - Canadian "Loonie" dollar coin introduced in circulation
1979 - Susan B Anthony dollar coin introduced in circulation
Read a little
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_coin_(United_States)
there have been 13 listed in wikipedia.
I'm always collecting Eisenhower dollars myself,
they are great for paying tolls on a motorcycle,
easy to grab, even with gloves....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The Aussies made the dollar coin larger than the two dollar coin.
Everywhere else with the same denomination coins made the two dollar coin larger than the one dollar coin.
I guess Australians for some reason assumed that it's how the USA would do it, and, ever desperate to be American themselves, they did the same.
Bye, bye Miss American Pie ...
A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
I live in the next over from where they print the paper used on $1 bills. $1 bills are by far the most common demonination and it's loss would be economic disaster for the region. There is just no way to absorb all the workers who'd lose their jobs if Crane (who makes the paper) loses that amount of business from the government. On the top of that no Senator from Massachusetts would ever support it and a majority of the our Representatives wouldn't either.
I agree with the idea of dropping the dollar bill but it it would be a politcal and economic disaster for Massachusetts, thus won't happen for a long time, if ever.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
but it quickly gets out of hand... can't wait to get back 14 of them for change at the toll booth. But this whole thing is pointless as the money 'saved' will be lost in inconvenience and then some. At roughly a penny per week per person, is it really worth it?
The idea that people hold more dollar coins than dollar bills is based on what happened in Canada and the UK when they replaced their lowest denomination bills with coins. Those countries wound up issuing 1.6 coins for every 1 bill that had been in circulation.
The GAO is predicting that the rate in the US will be about 1.5 coins for every bill.
Do you really know so little about the thing you are going on about? There was this place called Rome that you may want to read about.
. . .and swallowing the entitlement camel?
-The tax code is a train wreck
-There hasn't been a budge in years
-The President's going-in position to 'solve' the self-inflicted 'fiscal cliff' was literally laughed at by the Senate Minority Leader
If our government showed up in spandex and wigs and started playing hair metal, that would be an increase in the level of seriousness on display.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
And are eaten by a GRUE!
Never saw me coming. AC
We have a dollar coin already and to the delight of the U.S.Treasury collected as fast as they are produced.
Only place I can find any Susan B. Anthony's is change from the stamp machines
at the local U.S. post office.
Walmart gave out Susan B. Anthony dollar coins as change when they first came out, the difference
being they were gold colored (an official coin, not a false color). Damn the reaction I got handing those
out to pay for purchases, it was an immediate treasure to the person and it would appear collected like
all the rest.
What? Your local strippers don't have QR codes tattooed on their tatas?
I don't know about anyone else but I hate coins/change. I refuse to carry it as it takes up way too much space and about 90% of my transactions can be done with plastic.
I don't know what it is that makes people hold on to outdated ideas, even when the new idea has clear superiority. (Actually, I have no strong opinion on the dollar issue, but that's probably because nearly all of my purcahses are with a credit card.)
Dollar bills weigh less and are easier to handle in your wallet.
So keep them, just swap the $1 bill (and the $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills) to polymer instead of their current linen/cotton.
Plastic bills should last considerably longer, and be harder to counterfeit. (Canadian polymer bills are supposed to last 2.5x their previous non-polymer bills.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote
How about instead we ditch the fed?
That's why a lot of new vending machines now take plastic.
Nothing will ever again happen in the USA that isn't the way that it has always been done. Getting rid of useless low-denomination coins and notes, using the metric system... the USA is now stuck in a permanent unalterable nostalgia mode. To propose something as sensible as ditching $1 paper bills is tantamount to saying "I hate the Founding Fathers and Jesus and Ronald Reagan".
Many have commented that "people don't use $1 coins", but it's not like most people actually choose one over the other. In practice, you withdraw money as $20 bills or something like that. You only get $1 coins/bills as change when you buy something. So in practice, it's the stores and/or the banks that decide, not individual people.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It won't work for another reason...
Best Buy will try to have people using the new dollar coin arrested for counterfeiting.
All coins are printed by the ACTUAL US Mint. Dollars are printed (and are created by Fed Note debt) by a group of banks call the Federal Reserve.
Jimmy Carter created the Susan B. Anthony silver dollar and the banks put him on the menu (from what I heard).
So we print paper money, so the Federal Reserve banks can get their cut -- the rest of this debate about merits, efficiency and such are pretty much moot.
Here in the UK, we dropped the one pound note in 1984, a year after introducing a rather stubby (small, but thick and heavy) one pound coin. We even brought in a 2 pound coin in 1998 too. It shoiuld also be noted that UK ATMs have had a policy for a while of not stocking 5 pound notes (so the amounts you are offered by default are in multiples of 10 pounds), so the 5 pound notes in circulation are quite tatty now (I can't remember the last time I saw a new-ish 5 pound note!), though some banks have decided to reverse that decision recently.
The UK coin situation in terms of diameter is very inconsistent now - here's the order from smallest to largest diameter:
5p, 1p, 20p , 1 pound, 10p, 2p (!), 50p, 2 pounds
I guess that's what you get when you redesign coins at random times like the Royal Mint seems to do. As for notes, they too seem to get random redesign (and on rare occasions such as the 5 pound note, even the dimensions can change!), which is either because the Governor of the Bank of England has become bored with which 19th century celebs are on the designs or because the latest colour photocopiers have beaten their design security.
So to sum it up, UK coins are inconsistently sized and, like notes, are occasionally redesigned too. Must be a nightmare having to reprogram automatic vending machines every few years!
Okay perhaps the dollar bill has outlived its usefulness, I don't know.
But what savings could be gained by doing away with the useless penny?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No, it causes deflation.
Gold is basically fixed in quantity. Mining has little effect on the overall supply.
As the economy grows and the money supply is fixed, the value of money increases.
This shifts wealth to those people who hold cash, a non-productive asset.
This increase real interest rates, deterring investments in productive assets.
It is a horrible, horrible thing.
See “A Monetary History of the United States “ by Milton Friedman
The above is an example of the absolute garbage that economists and Federal Reserve apologists inflict on the world.
Even if money gains value due to deflation, would you hold your money for a 3% gain or invest it in a company thats making 10% gains?
How many countless billions have been wasted producing the Presidential Dollars?
I think someone wants to vindicate themselves for their approval to mint hundreds of millions of coins nobody wants.
Source
Ken
1. Withdraw the penny, nickel, paper dollar bill, 2 dollar bill, and 5 dollar bill from circulation;
2. Introduce 2 and 5 dollar coins and a 500 dollar bill;
3. Substantially increase production of the dollar and half dollar coins;
4. If the Republicans in Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling without conditions, the U.S. Mint would issue one or more 1 trillion dollar coins which are deposited with the Federal Reserve. These coins would feature the likeness of former President Ronald Reagan on one side and a quotation from the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the other: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Casualties in the withdrawals would be Lincoln (penny and 5 dollar bill), Jefferson (nickel and 2 dollar bill), and Washington (1 dollar bill). Consequently Jefferson would appear on the new 2 dollar coin, and Lincoln would appear on the new 5 dollar coin. Washington already appears on the quarter, and he'd stay there. The dime (FDR) and half dollar coin (JFK) would also remain the same. The presidential series of dollar coins would continue, but the existing Sacagawea dollar coin would be issued concurrently and thereafter as planned. The new 500 dollar bill would depict Martin Luther King on one side and the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on the other. It would also be physically larger than the other denominations, and it would be distinctly, tastefully, vibrantly multicolored. Hamilton would remain on the 10 dollar bill, Andrew Jackson on the 20 dollar bill, Grant on the 50 dollar bill, and Franklin on the 100 dollar bill.
Then you were un-cautious in picking your wife... Don't worry, I managed to be un-cautious twice...it's not happening again.
Considering that there's more than enough freelance murderers within the group that calls themselves "Muslim", you really want the other group of "murderers" for some time to come. Don't think that this is the case, go live over in someplace like Libya, openly being a Liberal idiot like you're doing here. See how long you last.
No. It is past time. We should have done this a decade or two ago. While we were not at it, we should also have gotten rid of the penny, and arguably the nickel*. Adopting the metric system would have been nice, too.
(*If we took this step, we would also want to change the quarter for a fifth, i.e. a 20 cent coin in place of a 25 cent one)
www.wavefront-av.com
This will not happen until Americans can let go of their irrational attachment to dollar bills and pennies.
In Australia we ditched $1 and $2 notes for coins in 1984 and 1988. 1c and 2c coins were dropped in 1992.
How's the inflation down there? Last I checked, everything in Oz(including local goods) costs 40% more than in places that still had dollar bills.
G'day Mate.
Heads up people! While this silly dollar bill retirement issue with its measly $4 billion savings for untold aggravation is being played out in the press and hoo-hawed on NPR and discussed and we are all distracted... ...just what stealth spending package is being pushed through Congress at this very moment? Something at least $400-billiony I'll bet.
I love the smell of Congressional bill riders in the morning. It smells like Real Money.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I know people who advocate dollar coins and have for a decade. The simple fact is real people prefer paper currency over coin for dollars. Ten singles weigh less and consume less space and are more conformal to wallets and clothing than coins.
I say even if dollar bills do cost more, pay it. It's worth it. Currency is nothing more than a form of exchange. If people vote with their behavior for currency over coin, the issuing agency should conform to HUMAN NEEDS.
The issue of currency or coin, or the issue of penny or not, intentionally misses the real problem. The FEDGOV is devaluing the currency to monetize the debt. Stop deficit spending and over promising the limited resources of the government and its taxpayer benefactors. Make a dollar worth 1-2% more every year, instead of less. Make it so dollar bills are coveted again. Re-release the $1000 bill.
JJ
We effectively only have coins for $1.00 and $5.00. It works just fine.
(I also use e-money cards like the Suica train pass at convenience stores, etc., because I hate change...)
A little background first: Panama uses the US Dollar but calls it the "Balboa". 1 Balboa = 1 Dollar and they look exactly the same because they are actually US dollar bills. Doing this has given Panama an economic stability unheard of in Latin America and contributes to the consistent annual 9% economic growth that the country enjoys, all while keeping inflation low.
A couple of years ago, Panama started to mint their own $1 coins. See here: http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_17/issue_02/economy_12.html. Now granted, they can't be used outside Panama and were actually minted in Canada, but the "Martinellis" as the Panamanians call the coins, named after the president, have some significant advantages over dollar bills:
- In a country where dollar bills do not get replaced frequently and are usually filthy, Martinellis are clean and durable.
- $1 in Panama can get a lot done for you: groceries bagged and carried to your car, a parking space from a "bien cuidado", and two of them will get you a taxi ride in the city. So dropping one or two coins is a convenient way to pay.
- Martinellis represent money that stays inside Panama and can only be used to pay for goods in Panama, thus reducing capital outflow (but of course, not by much as there aren't that many in circulation)
However, this money is minted independently of the US, so it actually represents Panama's own currency. I'm not sure if this is good or bad though.
It's my opinion that we are hesitant to make this move because the of the mental image between the US dollar bill and the strength of the nation. Politics, markets, economies aside a "greenback" is a symbol of the US as much as any monument or famous President. By making it pocket change you have marginalized the perceived strength of the US that a dollar represents in the minds of the Americans who use it.
Not going to happen. What we should do is print our money on hemp paper. Like the good old days. Then the bills would not wear out! For a look at a dollar bill from 1945, (actually a (gasp) silver certificate) visit my home page where the buck is prominently displayed. http://michaelslevinson.com/
Make a new dollar with 10 old dollars worth one new dollar. or just stop making dollar bills and make more two dollar bills.
Dollar bills are not going away! This country couldn't convert to metric or even ban incandescent light bulbs. No matter what the savings, the dollar bill will always be around
You owe everything your country produces (and more) to China, so just change to using the Yuan :-p
I'd support this when the Mint can pull its head out of its ass and come up with a dollar coin that CANNOT be mistaken for a quarter. It just doesn't seem that difficult to stamp something like a 12-sided coin.
SO let me get this striaght...
I pay 50 cents a year to use dollar bills and not have a pocket full of change like I do when I am in the UK?
I'm totally OK with this.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Convert what is left of fort knox and move to a sterling backed economy and make our curency worth somthing. The economy has been broken since the early 70's, it just took this long to fully register.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Don't believe any of the rheteric coming from that bunch these days
The GAO report is misleading in the same way that many GAO reports are. This is largely because the GAO essentially acts like a computer and answers the question with the parameters its given. In this case what is the savings of switching to coins assuming a 1:1 conversion.
This is misleading because in practice coins have much lower circulation rates than bills. There are a number of reasons for this such as weight, the need for different holding arrangements than the rest of the high denomination units, etc. What this means is that in order to meet the circulation needs you need more coins than the number of bills you are replacing. For example, in the United Kingdom after the switch over they found they needed 1.6 coins for each bill removed. Once you factor in this non-trivial increase in the amount of currency to match current levels of circulation, dollar coins actually cost more than the bills they are replacing.
NPR's Planet Money covered this brilliantly, and should be required listening for anyone who wants to comment on this debate:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
and
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/30/166253822/episode-364-should-we-kill-the-dollar-bill
tl;dr: Bills are cheaper than coins when you measure actual amounts needed in circulation.
Really? Paper money seems cheaper than metal money, lighter, easier to store.... Want to carry around $10 in $1 bills or coins? Coins are too heavy. I see a lot of cost to switch also... Usually, with the government, do just the opposite and that is the answer. So instead, they should be getting rid of a coin (pennies) not adding one. btw, we have a $1 coin and it is not popular for reasons I mention above.
Do the research! It is time to ditch the FED!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
...i'm a douche bag.
The UK coinage is perfectly logical:
Smallest value coins, 1p, 2p - round copper-coloured (actually now copper-plated steel) in increasing size.
Smallish value coins, 5p, 10p - round silver-coloured in increasing size.
Medium value coins, 20p, 50p - rounded heptagonal silver-coloured in increasing size.
High value coins: £1 round, gold-coloured very thick coin; £2 round, thin, bimetallic gold/silver coloured coin; £5 commemorative - round huge silver coloured coin.
And the redesign a few years ago was the first time the designs on the reverse had been changed in over 40 years - it was time for a change; the queens' portrait of course has changed several times as she's got older, but the same happened with Queen Victoria.
It takes 32 quarters to wash a king size comforter in the large washer in the laundramat + 7 to dry in the large dryer. My fingers get so tired I can hardly fold it when it is done.
How about give back some more value to the original dolar bill instead of removing it. The current lack of use is due to the current lack of value, given the current inflation. If you really could buy something with the 1 dollar bill, then there is no need to remove it from circulation.
even governmental offices, won't take a bill >$20, why would you want to limit options at lower end?
Canada did it a long time ago, and you'll notice that our money is worth more than the US now...
as an aside, one of the side effects of going to the 1$ and 2$ coins, is that after the bar you develop what is known now as "Bar Change" in that you have about 5lb of coins in your right pocket...
I know you all like to make fun of the rest of the world's gay colour money, but you know you're like the one place in the world where all your money of all denominations are all the exact same colour right? Yeah, cause that is easy to figure out as well...
I understand most of the arguments against the dollar bill (and penny, nickle, etc.), but I don't believe this has been completely thought through.
First, 4 billion over 30 years? Right now, on the scale our World operates, 4 billion really isn't a whole lot to worry about (considering our deficit is in the Trillions). Take that further to $140+ million per year and it's tantamount to an individual who makes $150,000 annually saving $1.40 a year (assuming there's a direct comparison between the US's $15 trillion GDP and the $150,000 annual salary).
Then there's the question about with what we'd replace the paper money. Many here have suggested using coins, but, for me, $20 in paper money is a lot more convenient than twenty large coins in my pocket. Plus, even though it was suggested as a joke at the beginning of this thread, there are professions in which smaller denoms are heavily used, and I can't imagine a stripper or bartender wanting to head home with an extra 20 pounds of metal in her purse.
As far as the vending machines go, there's a perfect solution for that - start accepting debit cards or NFC and stop taking any sort of currency altogether. Of course, they may complain about the cost of having to service the machines because of the bills getting stuck, but, roughly translated, what they're actually saying is, "If we didn't have to accept dollar bills, we could let go of most of our service technicians." They may be annoying, but dollar bills clearly maintain someone's job security.
So while I see all the arguments against the dollar bill, just like with may "great ideas", no one has mentioned the downsides to eliminating it.
And as far as the penny goes, I don't know how factual it is, but there's an episode of "The West Wing" that talks about one reason we'll never ditch the penny - unless you move Lincoln's face to another coin, Illinois (and Kentucky for that matter) will always lobby against eliminating the penny.
send yr dollars to me
So they save the government 4 billion. What's the cost to retool every piece of equipment to accept and understand these new coins? Vending machines, toll booths, car washes, pay phones, change machines, slot machines, parking meters, etc. I can see this EASILY outweighing the possible cost savings, the gov is just passing a minimal (in the grand scheme of things) cost on to the private sector where it becomes a much larger cost.
A better solution would be to universalize debit cards by doing something to reduce the barriers to accepting them (i.e. cost for terminals, service fees, etc).
Don't. Here a one euro bill would be a most welcome thing.
I only wish that the fiat money were distributed fairly, rather than arbitrarily shared between the incumbent felons.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Just because they're doing it wrong is no reason to dismiss fiat currency. Indeed, methinks more people believe in the magical paper than in all the deities of the pantheon.
If the magical paper were disbursed by a less self-serving crew*, there could be reasonable justice. Just as arbitrary to continue using gold as an instrument of commerce, btw.
Rather than gluing hairs back onto a dead horse's carcass, modern societies could move on.
*Or use self service to promote efficiency: Incompetence merits life in gaol, corruption meets cruel and unusual execution.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Do it today and you're going to wind up needing avogadro's number to figure out what your dollar's worth in gold.
Getting rid of the $1 bill would open up the use of $2 bills. Then finally people will see that ....YES... that is a real US government issued note.
...no longer worth the paper it's printed on.
It's quite thicker