Presidential Currency

In what I can only assume is an effort to keep up with the Joneses on an international level, the US Mint has decided to put out new $1 coins. These coins, like the state quarters, will be the US Presidents in the order they served. There seems to be a disagreement amongst the various articles I've seen as to whether living Presidents will be featured (currently currency can only honor the dead.)

It's a fascinating idea and maybe this'll go over better than the Sacagawea coin did. (I enjoyed the Sacagawea dollar, myself. Right up until I tried to use one and was informed that it wasn't legal tender. I do wonder if the average American is smart enough to handle a coin based currency system.) Certainly collectors (myself included) will want to gather up one of each and push them into some cheap cardboard collectible holder for posterity. (Apparently this is one of the hopes of the US Mint as they make money everytime we pull something out of circulation. The state quarters have been particularly successful at generating cash for the Mint.)

In addition to helping generate revenue, the Mint suggests that they'll also be useful for teaching kids history. I suspect they're right. Who wouldn't learn the names of the Presidents if you got a dollar for each one you remembered? Other fanciful suggestions include turning the Presidential Dollars into a historian's version of baseball cards. I'll trade you a Taft for a Hoover. And then there are projections of how much money vending machine owners could save if they didn't have to provide (maintain and service) dollar bill slots. Nor should we forget how much easier this'll make paying a parking meter. These last two, however, presuppose that vending machines and meters will be upgraded to handle a dollar coin, a not insignificant undertaking, I would imagine.

That all aside, I do wonder if Americans are going to be able to see these coins as anything but collectibles. Americans who have travelled in a country that switched to the Eruo have probably experienced the bizarre realization that the handful of coins in your pocket is worth more than you'd usually tote around in your billfold. The idea that coins are "worth something" and not simply the change you get back when you break a worthwhile amount of money is a rather large cultural shift. While the $1 coin isn't a revolution in currency, I think that the government would love for it to start one. If they could just get dollar coins to catch on, then maybe they could try $5 and $10 coins and possibly even start phasing out bills, which would save them money in the long run. (Coins last longer and thus over the long run cost less to produce than paper money.)

While my first response was that another bout with the dollar coin was an ignorant idea, I'm starting to warm up to it. It'll be interesting to see if they take off at all. If nothing else, we'll be running out of quarters soon, so it'll be good to have something else to collect.