Who has more currency value, Washington or Lincoln?

Factual Questions
1

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I am turning to the Dope to help with a debate that my children engaged in over the weekend: some say that Washington is “more important” because he’s on a quarter as opposed to Lincoln, who’s merely on a penny, and others say that Lincoln is, because he’s on the five-dollar bill, while Washington is just on a single.

Leaving aside the fact that is isn’t really relevant to their importance in history, I decided to try and find out whose face is on a greater total value of circulating currency. In other words, is the number of pennies + (the number of fivers * 500) greater or less than (the number of quarters * 25) + (the number of singles * 100)?

For the sake of sanity, we will ignore the presence of Lincoln on the back of the Illinois and South Dakota (as part of Mount Rushmore) state quarters, and on the series of Presidential Dollar Coins.

I found a rough estimate of 140 billion pennies in circulation, but my Google-fu is not doing a good job of finding numbers for the other denominations. Can anyone out there do better?

2

According to here, the penny overwhelms the other currency.
Lincoln:
1650 billion pennies = $16.5 billion
2.2 billion $5 bills = 11 billion
Total: $27.5 billion

Washington:
0.37912 billion quarters = $0.09478 billion
9.5 billion $1 bills = $9.5 billion
Total: $9.6 billion

Even using the lower number of pennies given, 140 billion, Lincoln still wins. I hope I did the math right.

3

I’m not having any trouble finding numbers on google, but I am having trouble finding numbers that are consistent with each other.

This site is about 10 years old, but has all of the different values together and seems to be the most accurate when I compare its numbers to those on other sites:

Penny 13,123,260,000 $131,232,600
Quarter 1,084,680,000 $271,170,000
$1 8,718,482,681 $8,718,482,681
$5 1,569,029,931 $7,845,149,655

So taking these numbers, pennies plus fivers is $7,976,382,255 and quarters plus singles is $8,989,652,681. Pretty close, but Washington wins.

4

That number seems very wrong. That’s not much more than one quarter per American.

5

Yeah, that’s just the production run for 2009 according to the cite.

6

With a magnifying glass, you can see the statue of Lincoln between the middle columns of the Lincoln Memorial.

Which means Lincoln appears on both sides of the penny, so maybe he should get double points or something. :sunglasses:

7

Same for the back of the $5. Now let’s figure in that the Memorial got removed in 2010 for a shield, and wasn’t there before the 1950s. And that the Washington quarter started in the 1930s or so, while the Lincoln penny has been around since 1909.

8

I have a hard time believing that there are more than 100 times as many pennies as there are singles. I mean, I have on average somewhere around 2 or 3 dollar bills, but even counting the mound of loose change on my desk, I don’t have a full dollar’s worth of pennies. Unless the penny numbers are just skewed up by a small number of people with very large penny jars?

9

Just in case you decide the dollar coins are significant, here are the total mintages according to the U.S. Mint:

2007 George Washington: 340,360,000
2010 Abraham Lincoln: 97,020,000

That’s almost another quarter million dollars for Washington.

10

That isn’t the total number in circulation, it’s the 2009 production.

And it’s not even the final production number. It’s a year-to-date partway through 2009. According to the U.S. Mint, there were 2.354 billion pennies produced in 2009.

Note that the number of pennies in mcgato’s cite is off by 3 orders of magnitude (it should say “billions” not “trillions”).