But when you spend the dollar bills, you get coins as change. So you have to carry the coins anyway, don’t you? How is it different from carrying 5 & 10-dollar bills and ending up with a handful of coins as change?
I’ve noticed it’s common for people to have that type of stubbornness when things change, or when they move overseas. It doesn’t prove much. I’ve lived in the US for about 10 years total, including the past 2.5 years, and there are many things I refused to change just because of sheer bloody-mindedness (e.g. always backing into parking spaces).
You know why these “dollar coins” flop? They’re too small! Back in the 1970’s, Silver Dollars were big honking things. People never accepted the Susie B. because they simply couldn’t get their minds around the dollar being tiny.
For me an additional issue was that I could never get them from my bank; if I could have gotten all the Sackies I wanted and remembered always to carry some with me, I could have avoided getting any singles in change.
From what I’ve seen of the new design the ‘tails’ side looks pretty good to me. Not so sure about the ‘heads’, but then I never thought Washington looked terribly great in any of the pictures on our existing money.
Every time these threads come around I’m reminded of the debate back in the late 80’s when the Loonie was introduced here. Exactly the same arguments were given. Every single thing anyone has said in this thread in opposition to dollar coins I heard 20 years ago up here. And after a couple years, absolutely everyone preferred the loonie to the dollar bill. When I was in Michigan for a few years a while back, I found that my wallet was usually fatter from all the singles than it ever is here with loonies and toonies in the change pouch. And trying to convince a vending machine that a tattered one is actually money? Bah.
A dollar coin would make it practical to buy more things with just coins, and in doing so, you would be more apt to use the change you already have, to round up to the nearest dollar or at least avoid getting another $0.97 in change by fishing out a few pennies. That way change wouldn’t accumulate so rapidly. I definitely noticed that in Germany in the pre-Euro era. They had pfennigs, worth only about half a U.S. cent, but you didn’t mind them because they didn’t accumulate. The reason they didn’t accumulate was that they had other commonly circulating coins all the way up to 5 marks–I remember paying restaurant bills with just a couple of coins–so you always had opportunities to get rid of your pfennigs in the course of day-to-day transactions.
As matters stand change tends to accumulate, I think especially for men, because we generally carry coins separately from bills in a different pocket. It seems that just about everything costs at least a couple of dollars, so any time we buy something it means fishing bills out of our wallets. That already takes time, and it takes both hands, so often it isn’t practical or considerate to spend futher time reaching into our front pockets for coins. And with each broken bill there’s more change and more coins.
People hate dollar coins because they’re so DAMN HUGE. Not as big as the silver dollars, sure, but I hate my wallet when it is filled with them.
They should be as big as or smaller than quarters. If they were convenient, people would use them.
But anyway, this whole thing is just A BIG SCAM by the mint. They don’t want anyone to use it. THEY EVEN SAY IT, “Congress’ 2005 act to create the new dollar coin specifies that the program is not intended to supplant the paper dollar bill.” All they want is to make money off collectors. That was pretty much the idea behind the sacagewea as well. (And the idea behind the state quarters.) The more ubiquotous they become, the less people will want to collect them. (Again, citing the article, “the Mint’s successful 50-state quarters program helped push usage of the coins as even collectors spent their duplicate versions”).
AHHHHHHH, THOSE BASTARDS. Where the hell do the mint’s profits go, anyway? I bet the money just gets laundered and into some politicians’ pockets. I want real, honest dollar coins. I also don’t want any more pennies (off which the mint also makes money because everyone just throws them out). But with these profit motives, neither of those two things are going to happen.
Yeah, but nobody in their right mind would want a big dollar. It’s just too small a value to be represented by an Eisenhower-dollar sized coin.
Most people didn’t even like real silver dollars in the old days, when a dollar was worth about twenty in today’s money, and there was little need for them. In those pre-inflationary times the purchasing power of nickels, dimes, and quarters was so great that it didn’t make sense to have a dollar coin; it was just too much “coin” to be lugging around, especially when the public knew they could always demand silver for paper at the bank if they really wanted it.
The difference is that our government won’t have the guts to pull the dollar bill, so the dollar coins will fail again. People down here cry bloody murder about any change to the currency, as if we have a God-given right to always have the exact same money we’re used to using; never mind that the coins and denominations were mostly set forth 150 years ago or more. It’s not as if we voted for the coins we’re stuck with now; we inherited them. Nobody votes for what coins they want, and in this I truly believe the government should have the right to dictate. The purpose of currency is to facilitate commerce and not to kowtow to hidebound reactionaries… They shall not crucify the working man on a cross of pennies and dollar bills!
No, that means that they’re not trying to replace the bill with the coin, just adding it. If they didn’t want people to spend the coins, they wouldn’t release them this way. There are several different coins that the Mint doesn’t want people to spend, and they’re not in circulation. The point of making coins and putting them into circulation is to have people spend them.
In any other context, this language would be considered a sop to the pro-paper side. Except a “sop” is normally a trivial compensation or recognition to the losing party in a transaction, and this is therefore not a sop. That provision of the law is that what will ensure that the new coins fail, and we will be having this same discussion five years from now, about yet another coin that will be “expected” to circulate alongside the dollar bill.
I don’t think the law states that there is a two-year wait, although they may have changed it. (FDR also recieved a coin the year after he died). There is, however, a ten-year wait for a person to be allowed to be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp (unless they were a President, in which case a memorial stamp is usually released a few months after their death).
Now that I think about it, the two-year period was probably put in effect for this program so that the Mint would have time to create a design for the coin. I imagine it takes a while to come up with a design for a coin. Let’s say that, hypothetically, that Carter and Ford both died in December of 2015. That would give the Mint less than a year to come up with three new coin designs to commemorate Carter, Ford, and the already-deceased Reagan to be put into circulation later in 2016. Since (presumably) each coin would be in mintage for four months, they’d have to come up with the Ford design and make it into dies by May. I imagine that would be difficult.
No, the point of putting them into pseudo-circulation is to make them seem more legitimate and more desirable to collect. A LOT of people stashed away golden dollars, and you can’t argue that more would have been collected if they weren’t released into semi-circulation. Even more state quarters would’ve been collected if they, too, were merely in semi-circulation.
Look, the government knows people don’t want dollar coins. The government also knows that minting commemorative coins, especially a whole series of commemorative coins, will get them taken out of circulation and will net them profits (especially given the popularity of such programs over the past few years). The government minting dollar coins featuring various presidents = the goverment looking to make money.
This is bad, because it very much takes away from the real aim of phasing out dollar bills. For one, the practicality of the design isn’t being considered. The size is too large. For another, it becomes in the government’s interest to release coins into circulation, but NOT TOO MANY or else they become commonplace and less worthy of collecting. Hence, the only time you’ll see a dollar coin in real-life these days is as change from a government vending machine, for which bills are complete impractical (and the stupid MetroCard machine won’t even give you more than six at a time! How do you explain that?!?!).
Forget them. I’m trying to imagine going into an Indian casino with a roll of Andrew Jacksons…
And here I’ve been using my change for laundry.
As I posted in that Heinlein thread in Café Society, I think the idea here is that, ideally, the denomination and durability of “media” (coins and banknotes) would correspond to the size and frequency of everyday transactions. The most frequent transactions would get the most durable media. If the most frequent transactions are in the one-to-five-dollar range, say, then it would make sense to make the denominations between one and five dollars use the most durable media: coins.
Of course, to do this, you’d need to conduct some sort of statistical survey to find out what are the most frequent transactions. But this would allow you to tailor the monetary media to how people actually use them.