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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Troodon, post: 207994, member: 4626&quot;]While waiting for the 2007 Kennedy halves to be offered for sale (were originally supposed to be for sale today, but got pushed back another 10 days apparently) started to wonder: why do they still mint these?&nbsp; They&#039;ve hardly circulated at all since they were first minted.&nbsp; The 1964&#039;s were mostly hoarded, due to be a new coin, featuring the recently assasinated JFK, and also because people knew that they would no longer be minting silver coins.&nbsp; They tried to get people to stop hoarding them by producing silver clad, but that failed... and when they took silver out enitrely people just generally didn&#039;t care anymore, having been weaned off the need for half dollars for normal circulation.&nbsp; They almost ceased minting them in 1987... only ones made that year were for mint sets, and the 1987 P&amp;D are each tied for about the second rarest in the series (rarest being the 1970D, itself also only minted for mint sets) but the kept on minting them.&nbsp; Since 2002 they have pretty much ceased minting them for general circulation and only mint them for the sake of collectors (who seem to be not all that interested either, considering the mint still has 2001 and 2006 halves available for sale!).</p><p><br /></p><p>Realistically, what do you think the life span of this coin is?&nbsp; I&#039;m amazed that it&#039;s been minted for 43 years an counting, considering how little practical use it sees.&nbsp; Only places I&#039;ve seen it circulate much are in casino towns, where casinos use it mainly for blackjack payouts to avoid the neccesity of having a chip or token worth 50 cents (and for the 50 cent slot machines).&nbsp; When I get them from the bank to search for silver and spend the extras, many people who weren&#039;t even born yet when the series started remark on them as something they&#039;ve never seen.&nbsp; Lots of people I&#039;ve met aren&#039;t even aware they still mint half dollars.</p><p><br /></p><p>But yet the mint still mints millions of them every year, just as the BEP prints millions of $2 bills that see almost no use before they had back to the bank.&nbsp; I just don&#039;t get it...</p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe they want to keep it going until 2017, so they can do something special for the 100th anniversary of JFK&#039;s birth?</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course the reason it&#039;s still minted is that congressional legislation demands it... but why hasn&#039;t Congress seen this virtually unused coin as basically a waste?&nbsp; Of course I&#039;ll still collect it, this and Lincoln Cents are the only coins I seriously collect by series, but I&#039;m just wondering what the reason for this coin continuing is, unless it&#039;s just been forgotton about to the point where they&#039;ll keep minting it in perpetuity despite the fact hardly anybody is using them.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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