Get rid of the dollar bill, and use the dollar coin.

**Detecto** · 12-22-2011 08:40 PM

Each dollar bill costs 10 cents to print.

Each dollar coin costs about 10 cents to mint.

Congress used to argue that a dollar bill was cheaper to print, but since cotton has gone up in price, both are nearly the same price (10 cents).

A dollar bill only lasts about 2 years. Pull out the ones that you have, I bet over 75% of them are series 2009.

A dollar coin on the other hand, lasts THIRTY YEARS, or more.

So in a dollar coin's lifetime, 15 dollar bills will be printed.

So what makes more sense, making something for 10 cents that lasts 30 years, or printing something for 10 cents that lasts 2?

How do you confuse a dollar coin with a quarter? If your looking at your change, dollar coins are easily spotted by their gold color.

If your digging in your pocket the dollar coin has a smooth edge, and the quarter has a rough, reeded edge.

There are also people who argue that the coins will weigh them down. "I don't want to carry twenty of them in my pocket."

Who carries twenty 1 dollar bills? Exactly...

Canada has not used dollar bills since 1989. We need to stop being such a stick in the mud.

**TheCoinGeezer** · 12-22-2011 08:45 PM

I really doubt that dollar bills cost 10¢ each to print.
Where are you getting your "facts" from?

**Detecto** · 12-22-2011 08:51 PM

In 2008 the cost was 6.4 cents a note, and that is official word from the BEP (the ones that print the bills).

Since then, the price of cotton has shot up quite a bit, and most people have calculated it now costs 9.6 cents to print a dollar.

**icerain** · 12-22-2011 09:22 PM

Don't know if it will happen but I agree that the one dollar bill should be stopped. Its much easier to handle the coins. They're smaller and last longer, this week alone I got 3 one dollar bills that was ripped and taped back up. And I see a lot of people are charging small purchases on their credit cards.

**sodude** · 12-22-2011 09:25 PM

If it only costs 10 cents to make each one, then they might as well keep printing them.

**fretboard** · 12-22-2011 10:27 PM

Originally Posted by Detecto

A dollar bill only lasts about 2 years. Pull out the ones that you have, I bet over 75% of them are series 2009. A dollar coin on the other hand, lasts THIRTY YEARS, or more.

Since our Government is having issues with millions of stockpiled President dollar coins I gotta agree with you. It would save our Gov't thousand upon thousand of dollars and with the large deficit we have come to, maybe all US citizens should welcome that idea. BTW, why didn't you just have a poll? just a thought!!

**Numbers** · 12-22-2011 10:30 PM

Originally Posted by Detecto

In 2008 the cost was 6.4 cents a note, and that is official word from the BEP (the ones that print the bills).

Since then, the price of cotton has shot up quite a bit, and most people have calculated it now costs 9.6 cents to print a dollar.

Try 4.8 cents in 2010, 5.5 cents in 2011. See Table 2 of this Federal Reserve budget document. Clicking back a few years, the 2008 rate was 4.7 cents. The figures you're quoting appear to be the average costs for *all* denominations of currency, including the higher-denomination bills with more expensive security features.

On the other hand, the latest production cost of a dollar coin, from the Mint's 2010 annual report (huge PDF file, see page 29) is 31.6 cents--and that's probably gone up a few cents in 2011 with rising metal prices.

So a dollar coin costs six to eight times as much as a dollar bill, not the same amount as a dollar bill.

Meanwhile, the latest estimates of dollar bill lifespan are about 40 months, as compared to 30 years for the dollar coin. So the coin lasts about nine times as long as the bill, not 15 times.

Thus the dollar coin has only a very slight edge over the dollar bill in cost-effectiveness (nine times the lifespan for about seven times the cost). The savings obtained by switching from bills to coins wouldn't be enough to cover the startup costs of minting tens of billions of dollar coins. (That huge stockpile of unwanted dollar coins the Fed is sitting on? It's not even a tenth of the number we'd need if there were no dollar bills.)

Canada and other countries switched from bills to coins in the '80s and '90s, when metals prices were lower and the switch made more sense from a cost-benefit standpoint. Probably we should've done it then too. But since we didn't do it then, it'd be fairly silly for us to do it now, when it no longer makes economic sense.