Coins Nobody Wants
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to picture Congress coming up with an idea as silly as the one reported by NPR this morning. The plan to slap together a billion pieces of cheap metal stamped with the likeness of former presidents certainly demonstrates the arrogance we’d expect from our representatives. Perhaps they’ll come up with some late-night infomercials to help prevent this stuff from piling up more than it already is in the Federal Reserve vaults.
“In the past four years, the U.S. government spent $300 million making a billion coins that no one wants — the result of a Congressional mandate to mint $1 coins bearing the likeness of each U.S. president.”
Great. I’m glad our government is so efficient that it only costs them $300 million to create $1 billion.
The idea behind the dollar coins is that they save the government money over printing dollar bills (which wear out and have to be replaced every two years on average). The problem isn’t that Congress ordered the minting of the coins; it’s that it didn’t have the guts to kill the dollar bill and is still needlessly spending millions printing nearly useless pieces of paper with George Washington’s face on them. Americans would get used to the coins quickly if they needed to.
Congress also doesn’t have the guts to kill the penny, which is long, long overdue. It’s a tremendous waste of tax dollars to print those little coins which have no real value. Even nickels are worth more as scrap metal than they are as money. Americans would simply round transactions to the nearest dime, and the increased productivity gained from not carrying useless change and the time spent making change would boost the economy.
The problem with the dollar coin is that they insist it be about the size of a quarter.