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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 .....
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!
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.
With dollar coins?
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...
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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.
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.
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.
You want to carry a stack of 1 and 5 dollar coins in your pocket? Or will it be in a sack tied to your belt?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
I use them. Way easier to keep a bunch in the ash tray to pay tolls with.
People would use them if they stopped printing dollar bills.
It doesn't matter if anybody wants them or not, the solution is simple. Start making one dollar coins. Stop making one dollar bills. Very quickly, your entire economy has switched.
That's what happened in Canada. What, you think there wasn't resistance when we eliminated our one dollar bill or two dollar bill (which was far more commonly used than in the US)? Of course there was. And it didn't matter, because people didn't get a choice. The government decided they wanted to save money, so they did. It's not an election-level issue, so they could do that sort of thing.
The only reason that the dollar coin has not succeeded in the US is because the US government doesn't know how to do such transitions.
Nothing is stopping you from buying gold.
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.
the smallest euro bill is 5€, the smallest bill here is worth ~10usd
Unless you try to buy electronics with it, then it's only worth like 3usd.
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I already don't carry around cash much. Even the vending machines in my office take cards (most evil thing ever.) Chances are I'd end up saving more when I did have cash on me as I'd toss 'em in the bucket I have of coins at home, grabbing a handful when I need them.
Not that I can withdraw 1s and 5s at the bank as it is. Minimum of $20 and a multiple of $20 from there.
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.
Well that's great and all but rather off topic. Cash for in case of a bad position comes in the form of a 20 or larger, not a stack of singles. And the topic at hand is dollar *coins* which are much better for privacy if you stop to think about it since unlke dollar bills, dollar coins don't even have serial numbers.
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
Getting rid of $1 bills isn't despotism, it's pragmatism.
Should the US start printing 25-cent bills? 10-cent bills? More choice is better, right?
At a certain point, you have to realize that having unlimited choices is just silly. A $1 coin functions just as well in an economy as a $1 bill (and lasts longer, thus costing society less). If you don't like increasing amounts of change, do what most Americans do and use credit or debit cards.
As a side effect, use cash, save those increasing piles of change and you can put hundreds of dollars into your savings account every year just by rolling it all up.
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.
..when they drop inches, Fahrenheit, SUVs, bipartisan politics, Creationism, buying on credit, pork barrelling, guns, corn syrup, jingoism, Hollywood and voting machines.
Why would you have a ton of them? You cycle through them. If you have some loonies or toonies, you pay for your coffee with that. If you don't, you break a bill, and get some coins, and pay for the coffee with coins the next time. Since most vending machine payments are with loonies or toonies, that also eats them up pretty fast.
Americans love coming up with reasons why the transition to coins is impractical, except most countries already did the transition and didn't have any of those problems.
Exactly. Here's some reading for you.
Link
But this isn't one of those decisions. Removing the $1 bill saves the people money. It doesn't particularly help the government at all. So how is this despotism?
Aside from the price!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Are the too sickly to handle the weight of a coin? Or just too stupid to understand what a coin is?
You want to carry a stack of 1 and 5 dollar coins in your pocket? Or will it be in a sack tied to your belt?
Having gone to many trips through the countries of Europe, I can say that you typically don't have a stack of coins in your pocket. Now that your change is worth something, you spend it first and only go to paper afterwards, rather than just using your pocket as a dump for all your change which gets emptied out at the end of the day. If you do get an uncomfortable amount of change in your pocket, that is just a reminder to use it first the next time you buy something and the problem is resolved. Because you use your coins first, you also tend to use all those small denominations too for exact change. Even if you pay with paper, you still pay off the change bit if you have it because you've already checked your pocket for enough money. End result is that I have less coins in my pocket than I usually do back in the States.
So that's $146,000,000/yr.
No, no. That's not the right way to look at it. It's 4 BILLION being saved. What? Yes, that's over THIRTY years, but so what? Doesn't "4 BILLION" sound so much better than "1 BILLION" or even just "146 MILLION"?
Now we have the latest style of inflation: the number of years a small savings is multiplied by to produce the sensational amount to be reported by the media. With the budget, it's typically been 10 years (so they won't say "this cut to spending will save just 100 million", they report savings of "1 billion". Now it's 30 years. We've automatically saved three times as much as before!
Coins, I might add, fit very nicely into a piggy bank and the added jingle tends to be more impressive to children.
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
Not that I can withdraw 1s and 5s at the bank as it is. Minimum of $20 and a multiple of $20 from there.
I can tell you for a fact that banks (and credit unions) have 1 and 5 dollar bills on hand, as well as a full range of coins. They have to, since very few people have accounts that are an integer multiple of $20 and they have to be able to allow you to take your money out.
Maybe you're complaining because the ATMs don't hold anything but $20 bills? That's not the only way to withdraw money from the bank. It's the cheapest way for the banks, and it's cheaper to make a machine that deals only with one kind of bill, so that's what the ATMs do.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Ask any Scotsman, football is serious business. Any game that doesn't end in a riot wasn't a real game.
I believe Philadelphia Eagles fans are the same way.
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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