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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!
No stripper is worth a $5 tip to watch them on stage.
sudo make me a sandwich
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.
With dollar coins?
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 $0.10. Paper money and the existing dollar coins would keep the same value, just multiply the value of all the other coins.
1. Really not that expensive compared to the national debt.
2. It would be a form of stimulus that goes to middle class people with jars full of coins, not fat cats. It would spark the kind of spending they want to stimulate, just in time for Christmas.
3. The mint would once again be making money minting pennies and nickles instead of losing it. In the long run it would pay for itself. As an added bonus, you don't need to change the minting process.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Planet Money did a whole podcast on this. Don't see anyone linking to it, so here's the most current thing:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money
The short is: switching to dollar coins is both less convenient and more expensive than sticking with bills. It's surprising, given the much longer lifetime of coins, but unambiguous.
Up north we have 1$ 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...
RFID tags in their outfits, and when you go in you get given a "watch" wristband that will read the tag and credit that stripper's account. You prepay at the bar or on the door, and you charge your drinks to it too. If you go over, just top it up with the handy credit card machine that a hostess will bring to the table with your next round of drinks.
You can keep it anonymous, or you can register with the system for a discount on drinks and to make sure you always get a dance from your favourite girl.
This one's free, bitches. You know who you heard it from first.
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.
We should abolish all change below the dime, and turn the one and five into coins.
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.
You insert them in the slot.
Is this really that hard to figure out?
Backing up a currency is a tragic waste of gold, which has substantial industrial uses but sadly is too expensive because of the irrational attachment that people have to it. Plus if a new source of very large amounts of gold were to be discovered, then it would endanger the economy.
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...
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.
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/
That might've worked when there were less than a billion people in the entire world but even then they had to keep making the dollar worth smaller and smaller amounts of gold to keep up. In a world of 7bn+ people... it's just not feasible
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Nothing is stopping you from buying gold.
In $5 dollar bills. Unless you're not giving them enough to actually buy anything?
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!!
Yet...
I give my daughter her allowance in dollar coins (the gold colored presidential series and sacageweas); she has absolutely no problem at all putting them into circulation...
The idea isn't to eliminate the unit of currency, but replace the physical form with a more durable one. I fail to see how that changes anything in terms of you giving your children an allowance.
Give them $5?
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
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 /
Or as I said elsewhere there's also the pesky problem that even with a billion or less people in the entire world we were still constantly making the dollar worth less and less gold over time. DO it today and you're going to wind up needing avogadro's number to figure out what your dollar's worth in gold.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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!
Plus if a new source of very large amounts of gold were to be discovered, then it would endanger the economy.
While there are legitimate concerns with gold backed currency, this is not one of them. The danger to a gold based economy of a new gold deposit is nothing at all compared with the ability of the government to inflate fiat currency with short term self serving monetary policy.
wallet with coin holder?
pants with pockets?
The US has been officially metric since 1969. Compliance is of course voluntary.
If it's not some sort of euphemism, then I'm confused about what the problem is. Pay them with coins instead of paper. What's the problem with that?
Time to start equipping them with credit card processing.
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
I once thought this way too. But it is possible. Instead of a $1 USD buying a loaf a bread, it might actually buy 4 loaves of bread. I wish I could find the post that pointed this out, but I'm too lazy. We would still have money, but it would be worth more in the long run.
21st Century Renaissance Man
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.
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.
Aside from the price!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
Are the too sickly to handle the weight of a coin? Or just too stupid to understand what a coin is?
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.
Nothing except the United States government. They smacked down e-gold nice and hard.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2007/April/07_crm_301.html
ABSOLUTELY!!!
Most people don't realize that the U.S. BORROWS paper money. Every piece of paper currency comes with IMMEDIATE debt. That is seriously messed up, and really really really needs to end.
It's a ridiculous situation, clearly designed to put money into the pockets of the rich.
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.
I'm more concerned that the government might be conditioning us to get ready for when they finally introduce the Amero, linking us, Mexio, and Canada in some sort of Euro-esqe society.
Most of our measurements are actually defined by the metric system.
One inch is exactly 25.4 mm.
One pound is exactly 0.45359237 kg.
So we are using the metric system, just in a very roundabout way.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Instead of speculation from the economist that steered things into a bubble and crash why not consider the old "cross of gold" speech from back when a gold standard was causing problems?
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.
Prior to reintroducing new dollar coins, take all the SBA dollars and destroy them. Then the changeover might work.
*I suspect that there are many millions of dollars of SBA dollars which no-one wants, sitting in bank vaults.
Have gnu, will travel.
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! --
why is there some reason a dollar has to represent a significant amount of gold?
90 percent of what you buy in the US is packaged in metric, you just don't realize it.
They just label it so it looks like English.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That sounds nothing like an individual buying gold.
The gold standard wasn't the problem. The problem is that people weren't bright enough realize it is easier to divide the dollar to further decimal places than to divide a piece of gold.
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.
They also killed the Liberty Dollar, which was backed by silver and gold, calling its founder a "domestic terrorist". Seriously.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
For what it's worth, US $1 coins work much better for rolling across your knuckles than US $0.25 coins do.
AC likes to make it rain and doesn't want to injure his loved ones.
You could just make sure that employers pay their staff properly, and get rid of the stupid custom of tipping.
I'm so glad I live in a country where I don't ever need to do that.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
There. Fixed it for you.
Have gnu, will travel.
He got smacked down because he didn't have the gold in the vaults like he said he did.
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.
I hate the idea of introducing another coin. I'd rather introduce paper units to replace the coins we've got.
That said, stop being cheap and giving an allowance under $5.
Not stupid enough to want their funds in a bulky, heavy, and inconvenient form?
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.
The scarcity of gold makes it a poor and short sighted use for said industrial purposes.
Actually it was a problem since it created an increasing barrier of entry to people who wanted to use any sort of resource to do anything. The golden rule was that whoever had the gold made the rules. In that sort of system "startups" are impossible without an old money patron. The shift away from such things over the last few centuries resulted in modern society instead of static feudalism.
You could divide your dollars into smaller units and leave your gold value alone. The division of gold is finite. The resistance to moving the decimal on the currency is silly. Why people think that the math somehow works if you have a decimal that slides in one direction but doesn't work if the decimal slides the other direction I have no idea.
The only real difference is that it becomes more obvious and easy to calculate how much your purchasing power is changing.
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
Citation needed.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
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
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
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
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?
Read up on what happened to the Spanish Empire. Also to a lesser extent, the American economy in the latter part of the 19th century. In Americas case it was as much silver as gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's because the dollar was not created tied to the british pound, it was tied to the Spanish/Mexican silver Peso, which was decimalized in 1863.
No sig for the moment.
But it would just be weird having a loaf of bread going up and down on a day to day basis. Plus when I think how I lost out on the gold I bought in the late '70's thinking it was a safe bet. Much better to use something with actual worth such as chickens. A chicken is always worth a chicken dinner, gives eggs as interest, needs to be looked after to keep it's value and the supply can naturally be increased to reflect the price of wheat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's strange as 80% of stuff in Canada is things like 3.78 l, 454 g, 473 ml and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
It does not ignore it. They said when they took that into account, it was a wash. I like the story because it taught me something I hadn't thought of: that people don't like to spend coins.
They do when the coin is actually worth something, much like people put up with having a big wad of singles in their pocket, yet wouldn't put up with 10 cent notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
bet your wait staff at you countries restaurant love it when your there don't tip and are never tempted to spit on your food
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
There is one in every crowd.
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.
The great European empires had problems because of monetary policy, not because of a gold standard. Look up problems associated with the mercantile system.
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.)
How about instead we ditch the fed?
I was thinking more of the inflation problems brought on by the massive amounts of gold that was taken from the Americas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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".
The US may have done it longer, but we've sucked at it.
that's a relief.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
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
Tell that to the government of Zimbabwe or anywhere else where the local currency is ignored and something else is used.
I do not think you know what gold is, apparently... it's a physical object...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
s/dollar bills/dollar coins/g
Not a terribly hard concept...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
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
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.
So a combination of sickly enough to find carrying a few coins heavy and stupid enough to not think of exchanging 2 or 5 coins for a far more easily damaged but lighter form of currency?
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
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>
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.
Nothing is stopping you from buying gold.
But there are laws that say you can't stipulate a contract to be paid in gold. You can stipulate a contract that involves you being paid in other forms, but gold is explicitly banned.
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/
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 ?
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
I'm actually ok with fiat currency. It allows for adjusting the money supply for various reasons. The problem I have is with debt-backed fiat currency like teh Federal Reserve gives us. The USA basically borrows all of its money from the Fed. Why should a nation borrow all of its money, when it could print it itself? The US treasury could print money and spend it into existence, rather than us borrowing it into existence.
It's not a perfect system. But neither is the gold standard. I think reasonable people can disagree, but I haven't found anyone who agrees that we should borrow all our money. Of course, most people don't realize we borrow all of our money. Hence why I chose the sig I did.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Nothing is stopping you from buying gold.
That's really not the same thing.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Why would they do that? They don't expect tips.
No-one tips me in my day-to-day job, why are wait-staff so special?
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
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.
First of all being sickly isn't a crime you inconsiderate bastard. And Sickly has nothing to do with it. Not wanting your pants to try to fall down defines heavy in this case.
First of all $2 bills exist but are not in common circulation so lets not pretend you can go exchanging for them left and right. And why would you want to exchange for $5 bills when you could just keep $1 bills for less than 50 cents a year? That 4 billion crap was a hyper inflated number derived by adding up the savings over 30 years. I'd give the 50 cents to avoid having change in my pocket even one day (in fact I have, many bums are happy that they were around when I found I had annoying change in my pocket) let alone to avoid it for 365!
I think it is incorrect to assume that gold will always retain a constant value with respect to other commodities. I also wonder what the cost burden will be for everyone to have to have scales and mass spectrometers to assess the purity and weight of the currency they receive.
Do the research! It is time to ditch the FED!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Your information is laughably out of date
Gold clauses were reinstated in 1977, some 35 years ago (at least in the U.S., perhaps there's another country out there that barred gold clauses). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_clause
In any case, a currency's value comes from acceptance and trust in future acceptance, by both merchants and the government. Individuals rely on the government to ensure that the currency does not become worthless. This doesn't always work. When the U.S. dollar was backed by gold, it did vary in value, sometimes in "shocks" that would cause the value to change drastically in a matter of weeks. What's the point of tying currency to a metal when the value actually comes from the ability to trade the currency?
Metals change in value, fiat currency changes in value, everything changes in value. It's preferable to keep currency somewhat stable in value (avoid rapid changes) so that wages and prices don't have to be adjusted every week. Long term, changes in the value will happen no matter what the currency is based on, and that really only affects debt. Lenders have to take inflation into account when calculating interest. If you're worried about your savings getting inflated away, buy a productive asset. If you really think a hunk of metal will have a good value in the future, you can even buy that. Personally, I think it's more likely a business will continue to have value in the future. For instance, a profitable brewery (a business that can command a premium on its work-product) is likely to hold its value well, so buy an interest in the brewery. If you're worried about one particular brewery losing value, spread your risk by buying interests in many breweries. If you're worried the whole industry will lose value, buy interest in many industries.
Money's primary usefulness is short-term, a medium of exchange. That's the aspect of it that needs to be preserved, not its ability to hold long-term value.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Oh come on! It's corrosion resistance and electrical conductivity make it by far the best material for a whole host of applications.
You must be pretty young.
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.
That is a vary intriguing idea and more in keeping with a real just free market system. It would mean an end to lies and games in the market place if the golld or silver dollar had its content set by its scarcity in the marketplace as a fixed currency and then we could make coins of lesser value as needed to buy everyday goods as dollars grew in value. We might need to have coins for thousands and ten thousands of the dollar but it would all be in relationship to the fixed unit1, as in the metric system. If a silver oz cost 33.440 Federal Reserve Notes, and a silver dollar was .77344 oz than your two cents worth would be worth about .52 FRN's at the going market price. And it would be constant value rather than the variable value we have now so you could decide how much money you wanted to put into the minting of a given coin.
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.
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...)
When I visited Japan, I bought a PassMo card for use on the train and convience stores like AM/PM. I also converted my change into American dollars as I left because you cannot convert Japanese coins into Canadian currency in Canada but you can use/convert American dollar bills here.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
...
Hard currency, with some inherent rarity, as opposed to endlessly inflatable scrip, would be a huge improvement.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a bit of history, yesterday, which mentioned that Marco Polo was impressed by Kublai Khan's abuse of scrip. He was powerful enough to get away with murdering anyone who would not accept his scrip, and sensible enough to limit how much he issued. OTOH, as soon as he died, the scam fell apart.
The story has been repeated many times, whether it was scrip or debased coinage (made from cheaper metals).
The government has floated this dollar coin idea several times because the coins stay in circulation longer than paper. But they made a huge design error. People were still aware of the near-full-bodied silver coins that had existed before. They might get away with Johnson slugs -- copper-nickel alloy masquerading as silver small change -- but they keep insisting on trying to make the copper-nickel dollars essentially the same size and thickness as a quarter.
The one ounce of silver silver dollars were both thicker and bigger around, so people who are savvy or have been around longer just keep on rejecting them.
At the same time, the feral federal government has been issuing over-priced "medallions", with nowhere near the current market value of silver in them as marked on the face. It's a total fraud... but then, that's the whole idea of scrip, to commit fraud on the little people who can't effectively defend themselves.
Hmmm, that's also why the patriotic western Pennsylvanians used their whiskey in exchange instead of the government scrip, and then tarred, feathered and burned down the houses of the government thugs who tried to extort more from them through Hamilton's hated unconstitutional tax on whiskey.
And how is an X standard where you constantly keep making the dollar worth less and less X any different than fiat currency alterations?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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).
Yes, again, the inflation to which you refer was a product of the merchantile system, not of a metal standard per se. There is an excellent analysis of merchantilism and its associated inflation in the chapters titled "Of the Principle of the Commercial or Mercantile System" and "Of Restraints upon the Importation" in Smith's Wealth of Nations.
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.
Mean time to liberatarian on Slashdot: 3 posts.
It's quite thicker
Don't have to make it a gold standard. Just abolish legal tender laws and let the market sort it. Or wait for Google ("Planetary Resources") to dump one of those shiny new asteroids full of platinum and gold a few years down the line.