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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 649963, member: 11668&quot;]This is actually false.&nbsp; There&#039;s a law against putting living people on currency or stamps, but that law does not cover coins--the reason being that the law was passed back before any coins depicted real people anyway, so nobody thought to include coins in it.&nbsp; (There&#039;s a very good story behind this law; it was passed because Spencer Morton Clark, the bureaucrat in charge of selecting the Fractional Currency designs back in the 1860s, decided to put his own portrait on one series of the five-cent notes.&nbsp; Before that unfortunate incident, several better-qualified living people had appeared on the currency without much objection, including Lincoln during his presidency.)</p><p><br /></p><p>More recently, the law that created the Statehood quarters specifically prohibited any image of a living person from appearing in that series.&nbsp; Likewise, the law that authorized the Presidential dollars says that a President must have been dead for two years in order to be included (though it says no such thing about spouses, as already pointed out).</p><p><br /></p><p>But there&#039;s no law against putting a living person on any other coins, only a strong tradition of not doing so.&nbsp; There&#039;ve been five commemorative coins depicting living people--including that Sesquicentennial half-dollar with the portrait of the sitting President--but in each case there was some grumbling when the coin came out, and one or two of the people so &quot;honored&quot; were strongly opposed to the idea themselves.</p><p><br /></p><p>If the Treasury decided tomorrow that they wanted to put Obama on the circulating dime instead of FDR, there&#039;d be no law stopping them.&nbsp; But I&#039;m guessing that, long before the new design got through the mandated review process, Congress would rush such a law into the books...look what they did when the Mint tried to take Jefferson off the nickel in 2003.&nbsp; Therefore, the Treasury wouldn&#039;t try such a thing even if they wanted to; nobody wants to bring that much controversy down upon themselves.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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