Lobbyists Press for US Dollar Coin

Not concerned so much as being sensitive to the need to provide a more appropriate alternative to the other locations where the coins could go. Sort of an OSHA issue.

 

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I have heard these arguments since 1977 when the Eisenhower dollar was declared "too big."

It is extremely clear, and not just from an American coinage standpoint, but internationally, the only way to get the dollar coin to circulate is eliminate the currency. The Anthony dollar was supposed to be "the solution." It was not. It is the most studied coin "failure" in world history, by mint after mint after mint, worldwide. It has also managed to drag a fine American historical figure down into oblivion.

The Sacagawea and Presidential dollars moved the coin into the next level. The dollar coin still does not circulate. It circulates so little in fact that I have been presented with a dollar coin, often a Washington dollar, that has been received in circulation by a friend or colleague with the question, 'what is this?' or 'is this worth anything?' That is how badly the dollar coin is viewed in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, a billion or two pile up in bags in the vaults of the Federal Reserve system, with a few million for we collectors, with five varieties issued a year. The Native American dollars have never circulated.

The paper has to go. It's simple. The two-dollar note will take up most of the slack, anyway.

 

Too much pork. That's why these don't circulate........

 

A wise man once said that repeating an unsuccessful action time and time again expecting to achieve different results is the definition of insanity. Sounds about right in the context of lobbying for a dollar coin.

 

If you do it in the same failed way, then yes that is true.

But we're putting 3 billion $1 bills worn beyond use in landfills a year. That isn't sustainable. It's costing us all that money to circulate paper money that we could better use elsewhere.

It's time for us to take our medicine on this issue and be done with it.

 

Reagan on the $500 bill I could live with !

 

Well they haven QUITE been repeating the same thing each time. The made the SBA and it failed, too similar to a quarter. Next time with the SAC they changed the color and gave it a smooth edge. Worked better, and might have worked even better if they had continued the Wal-Mart promotion longer. (Wal-Mart distributed more in the one month promotion than the government did in the next two years.)

The next time they thought multiple design might work, it had done wonders for the quarter. They didn't seem to realize that changing the designs on a coin no one sees doesn't do much to make people want to use it. (Interestingly when they were discussing how to distribute the President dollars one of their concerns was to "Not have another failure like the Wal-Mart promotion was." They failed to recognize that the Wal-Mart promotion was the biggest SUCCESS they had had in the whole small dollar fiasco.)

In 2013 they finally did the thing that could actually make it work. For the first time ever they introduced legislation to discontinue the dollar note. Of course as a stand alone it went nowhere. If it had been included with the Presidential dollar legislation back in 2005 it could have made them a success. So all the parts have been there now, they just haven't managed to get them all together. Now that they have all the parts, it's just in time for the end of the Presidential dollar coins.

That would seem to give them the opening they need for a bill that would bring everything needed to make a successful dollar coin, but after three failures and a huge stockpile it so going to be hard to push through yet another dollar coin. maybe after another 15 to 20 years once the stockpile declines it would be easier.

 

I knew about the Walmart distribution but I never knew the degree of success regarding that distribution with regard to the mints' efforts.

 

The British got it right with the one pound coin. Small enough that a handful of them aren't too bulky, thick enough to be easily differentiated from other coins.

 

Another dollar coin without the withdrawal of at least the one dollar bill would of course be a fiasco that any clear-thinking person could see, which is of course why we might have to relive our long national nightmare.

There are two points I would like to make. The first is that I doubt it is the merchants who are stopping the success of a dollar coin in the current economy. As a consumer I rarely use cash, and when I do I would absolutely refuse a dollar coin given instead of a dollar bill. Secondly, those who point to the British pound as a success have a good point, but the counterfeit rate on those is something like 3% (official estimate) to 6% (industry estimate) and that means an awful lot of fake coinage is going to be floating around. I do not know how these numbers relate to fake one dollar (or one pound) notes.

 

Yeah. Aren't we supposed to like coins, around here? I choose to carry a few $1 coins each day, just cause I like buying a coffee or a beer or something small with only metal (brass, but still).

For larger purchases, I like having enough coin in pocket to make exact change for at least the first purchase every time I leave the house.

But the point remains... $1 coins themselves are not large money. The situation today is not analogous to the silver-dollar days.

 

I LOVE coins, but hate pocket change and most people throw all their 'change' into jars and dump them at the supermarket or bank to get 'rid of them'...and more and more people pay by plastic---bank-debit cards.

Obviously, eliminating the paper dollar will encourage folks to finally accept a dollar coin. Coinage preferences, like our stubborn insistence to retain our obsolete system of measurements in preference to the metric system, will always postpone the inevitable, however necessary the need for that change for any number of valid and critical reasons.

I collect all types of numismatics----from Ancient to Modern, and even tend to search rolls from the bank from time to time so my opinions do not reflect any 'hatred' of coins, just the realization that coinage usage and preferences modify and vary along personal and emotional reasons more than on logical terms....the 'penny' is a classic example; valueless on its own, and costing 3 or 4X its face value to produce....and everyone hates those annoying zinc-clad pains-in the-butts, yet billions of those things keep pumping out of the mint.

Like everyone else here, coins are my passion and I also realize as all of you do, that change has to come to our current denomination of coins, in whatever material or 'metal'. Eventually we will have a coin-type dollar and accept the metric system and even build a bridge from the east end of Long Island to Connecticut...but probably not in my life-time.

 

This is an interesting point I'd never considered before. Coins are way easier to counterfeit than notes. It's comparatively easy for anyone with a machine shop to mint coins (anyone who doubts this needs to read Numismatic Forgery), but much harder to print good counterfeits of contemporary currency.

The question is: could counterfeit $1 coins be made cheaply enough to be profitable, and well enough to fool people? As I recall, £1 is, and historically has been, quite a bit more money than $1.

 

And they weigh 20% more than our small dollars.

That's fine, but if the dollar note is discontinued you'll have to take four quarters instead. 22.5 grams of metal instead of 8.1 grams.

Currently the £1 is about $1.49

 

We waste countless billions in waste and inefficiency to keep a few people working in Massachusettes. This waste destroys tens of thousands of jobs.

This is Congressional Economics 101; it's someone else's money anyway.