I also find it useful, particularly when the coins that make it up are worth something in proportion to their bulk.
In Germany we had one-pfennig coins, worth only about a half-cent U.S., but they were so small neither the weight nor the jingling was a problem. Of course, we didn’t wear our pants 3 sizes too big either, so that also cut down on the jingling.
That’s not really much of an argument by itself. Suppose you lose 500 pennies a year. You’re out $5, which is less than an hour’s wage, even at minimum wage. For me, it’s less time than I burn with a couple of posts. 
But FWIW, I routinely throw pennies away. A dozen years or so ago, a number of us in the math department at USC (the original one) practiced the sport of penny-rolling. We had a long central hall in our building, and the object was to roll a penny down the hall from one end of the building to the other.
I still practice this sport when I’m in the grocery or one of the Marts at a quiet time of day. Seems to be the ‘highest and best use’, as the economists say, that I can put a penny to.
Definitely an argument for maintaining some sort of stripper-level 
paper denomination.
Besides, if there’s no paper money below the $5 bill, what are we going to stuff in DoperBabes’[sup]TM[/sup] cleavage at Dopefests? $1, sure. $2, probably. But $5? Fergit it. 
It saddens me to have to do this but
** I call for the immediate banning of Polycarp**
As a longtime poster he knows that a post containing civil language and demontsrating mercy and compassion has no place in the Pit. We have to stop this here and now.
Back To The Rant At Hand-A dollar coin must be a signifcantly different size of shape than the quarter. If the government issued say, a square coin, they could offer tax breaks or other incentive for companies to refit vending machines.
I agree with Sua that dollar bills are more convenient.
How much money would be saved by switching from bills to coins? Perhaps the convenience of millions of people is worth more than that amount.
Me.
College student.
Uses the vending machines a lot.
So I routinely carry around at least five bucks in ones… sometimes as much as fifteen. If I were to use coins, I’d suddenly find myself showing a lot of underwear as I walked.
Sorry, Javaman, but the “problem” is hardly as big as you think. And getting a dollar so beat up that you can’t use it in a machine probably comes up one time in a hundred.
And, RTF… I, too, routinely throw pennies away. I consider them to be bad luck, especially if you have only one of them.
I just wanted to comment on this real quick. This shows a deep overconfidence in the courage of American government officials. I feel that this will never happen in the current U.S. political climate, for the same reason we will never hear the government decree that “Okay, damnit, we’re switching to the superior and used-throughout-the-rest-of-the-world metric system.”
No sitting president wants to have to run for reelection, or attempt to pass power to his vice-president when that candidate would be running against some schmoe, of either party, who would be waving a dollar or a ruler over his head and vowing to “bring back the bill!”
Why not? It would be free votes, and probably in a not insignificant number. What party wants to be trying to defend themselves as “The Guys who got rid of the George Washington?” It will never be so economically inefficent to print paper money that it would be politically sensible to attempt to get the general population of the U.S.A. to accept a sudden decree from on high telling them ‘how they can spend their money.’
It strikes me now that I really should have ended my last post with:
“Americans fear change”
The solution to the too-many relatively worthless coins problem is to make the coins worthwhile again. Here’s a really creative and radical solution (that I read about somewhere but can’t remember where now): complete devaluation of the monetary system by a factor of 10. Make what it now takes a dollar to buy cost 10 cents, and what now costs $100 cost $10, etc. Suddenly all those coins will be worth carrying around again.
Well, not the coins we’ve got now. They’ll be an initial huge conversion cost to make new coin and currency sufficiently different from the present ones that the Secret Service won’t go too crazy looking for counterfeiters, but what the heck, it’s worth a shot.
Will it hurt the economy? I dunno, but I don’t see why it should.
What is so evil about hauling bills around? Or about paying for the piddly shit with bills and … (cue satanic music) … getting bills as change? Paper is a damn good thing to be carrying around: It’s light! It folds! You can carry great honking wads of it around with you without needing more pant-support than a sumo wrestler in tight-fit jeans! Paper doesn’t fall out of your pockets when you sit down (I have to carry around a change purse like a 17th century dipwad to keep my change from vacating my jeans, which might not be so bad if I lacked any Y chromosomes).
Cost is insignificant. We aren’t going to solve world hunger or save the Wild Black-Footed Kuroashi (fictional creature) or resurrect American footwear manufacture with what little we save on not making dollar bills. If our government does save something, it will just be thrown down another storm drain: The war on drugs, for example, or ivory backscratchers for the latest intern. Our government is not good at saving.
That said, we have godawful paper currency. First off, it’s paper. Australia has learned that lesson: Its bills are plastic. They’re colorful. They’re goddamned tough to counterfeit. And I’m sure they last a hell of a long time while still being more bendable than our rag-and-pulp scraps. Not to mention being more machine-readable. (Things which neatly explode all of the coin-bugs’ serious arguments.) With enemy groups around the world extremely good at copying the American $100 bill (a de-facto currency in plenty of places with completely debased national monies), we need to follow the Antipodean example.
That segues into my proposal:
[ul]
[li]Abolish the coin. It’s a relic of the bad old days of specie and ‘hard’ money vs. paper money. Mining is not a clean practice and the less of it we can do, the better. (Think copper mining is clean? Look at Anaconda. Look at Butte. Look at how the ‘Richest Hill on Earth’ became a toxic cesspool. Every one of our coins makes use of copper.) [/li][li]Replace all coins and all paper bills with plastic bills, with the exception of the penny. Drop the penny completely.[/li][li]Make the plastic bills out of biodegradable organic plastics, and make each denomination a different size and color.[/li][li]Integrate serious anti-counterfeiting measures on each bill, even the fractional-dollar ones. I’m talking holograms and colorshifting ink and permanently magnetized regions. You know: What other countries have been doing for decades. It’s a national embarrassment when an idiotic militaman can print up passable twenties with low-end home equipment. It’s a global threat when terror nations can create near-perfect hundreds out of cheap material with very little expertise.[/li][/ul]
Derleth,
While I agree with you about the Aussie “paper” currency, you didn’t mention that they have retained coins below the $5.00 level. They did abolish the penny, but have the 5 cent, 10 cent, 20 cent, and dollar coins. I personally like their system.
Lok
I still have no conception, even after reading everything here, of how coinage is somehow better than paper money.
I do not understand what the big deal is.
That’s interesting and completely irrelevant to my post. I didn’t advocate a complete port of the Australian system, I just advocated the copying of its best features.
(Of course, the uber-anti-counterfeit system is switching to a completely cashless economy where transactions are secured with strong cryptography. But I’ll stick to the battle at hand.)
I kinda agree with Derleth in that, I think the U.S. should consider printing even lower denominated bills, such as 50 cents, 25 cents, and even 10 or 5 cents (!). I think many people would rather have a fatter wallet than have coins jingling in their pockets.
My bid for the top:
Eliminate the sales tax.
Replace it with a value-added tax (i.e. tax the store not the customer).
Purchases will never come to $6.26, or $1.87 or other odd amounts. Everything would be $X.49 or $X.99. People will eventually get sick of always getting one penny in change, and soon we will not need any coins smaller than a quarter.
“Ah,” you say, “but what if unscrupoulous business owners try to get around the value-added tax by not ringing up every sale?”
Every cash register in the country prints a random number on the reciept. That number is a lottery ticket. Once month, you have a drawing and make a few people rich. Customer will start making a point to demand reciepts. Every sale gets rung up and every tax paid, and we stop screwing around with nickels.
(Okay, its not really my idea. I stole it from another country.)
Whoa…whoa…let’s not dance on Sackie’s grave so fast! I hate to break it to y’all, but the dollar coin is here to stay! The U.S. Mint has only temporarily stopped production on the coin, it has not–let me repeat–it has NOT been discontinued!
It seems that the Mint overestimated the number of coins needed, and now has a big surplus in its inventory. So it will wait for the backlog of coins to dwindle before it ramps up production again. But there is almost no chance that the coin will be permentantly discontinued. Its use is firmly established in many areas, and this will only grow rather than shrink!
I believe that the Mint felt that its promotion of the coin would be much more successful than it actually was. They overproduced the coin and it just wasn’t as popular as they thought it would be. Supply far overexceeded demand, which made it appear to be a failure.
But keep in mind that the use of the dollar coin has gone up in the last decade! And Sackie is far more popular than Susan B. It’s routinely used as change in Post Offices and subway stations nationwide. And it will continue to be. The use of the dollar coin will continue to slowly rise, and Americans will become more comfortable with them.
No, it won’t happen instantaneously, but I foresee that over our lifetimes the dollar coin will eventually become part of our daily lives. Eventually phone calls, soda pop, tolls and many other items will cost a dollar, and the coin will finally entrench itself in our culture.
But in the meantime, you can still get rolls of the Sacagawea coin at your local bank. And…no need to refer to Sackie in the past tense. You ain’t seen the last of her!
But in my opinion, their coinage system is one of their best features. I liked their bills, the different colors and sizes were very useful, but I also liked their dollar coin and the lack of a penny.
Lok
I’m going to side with paper money. The thing I disliked most about my 2.5 year stay in England was pound coins. I don’t like change purses, I don’t like heavy bulging pockets laden with coins, and I don’t like jingling when I walk. The only place coins show a distinct advantage is in vending machines, and the money scanning technology appears to be getting better (IMO).
It’s not that either kind of money is always better. Each kind of money has its uses. Its just that when none of the commonly circulating coins can buy anything*, your pocket is a one-way conduit to the coin jar at home. And the problem that I have with that is that, once I have a jar of pennies or nickels, or what have you, I am forced to expend additional time or money to render that money into a conveniently useable form. The accumulation of coins occurs because whenever we want to buy something, we virtually always have to reach for paper money and seldom trouble to reach into our pockets for exact change.
I consider low-value bills as somewhat embarrassing to a nation; they are a reminder of the time when a dollar was so much more than it is today, and how much inflation there has been. They’re something you find in places like the Phillipines, as noted above, with its notes worth $0.20 US. They’re reminiscent of Weimar Germany, when it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy groceries. To distill all my rambling verbiage, here as well as above, into a single sentence:
I’d like to have MONEY in my pocket, not just CHANGE.
*in this context “anything” doesn’t mean one-fourth of a wash cycle at the laundromat, or 15 minutes on the parking meter, but something a little more significant, like a magazine or sandwich.
So am I the only person on the planet who gives the cashier five dollars and eight cents when the bill comes to $4.33?