After the flops that were the Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollars, the Department of the Treasury needed to decide whether or not they were once again going to try to get Americans to embrace the dollar coin. It is a question to which there is no simple answer.
On one hand, the dollar bill is a genuine piece of Americana. George Washington's stone-cold countenance on the instantly-recognizable bill is one of the most easily identifiable images in the world. There's something about cold hard paper currency that is genuinely embraced by the populace.-áThe downside is that Americans love their one dollar bills so much that they are constantly using them and subsequently wearing them out. As a consequence, the average lifespan of a one dollar bill is somewhere around four or five years, and the government has to spend millions of your tax dollars on the destruction and production of one dollar bills.
This is where the one dollar coin comes in. The dollar coin would have a lifespan of around twenty years. It's practical: Virtually no other first-world country uses a paper bill for their basic denomination of currency. Coins last decades, they're rarely spit out by vending machines and they're easy to dry off if you accidentally run them through the washing machine. These are things you can't say about the dollar bill.
But to most Americans, it doesn't matter: It's these things that make the dollar bill the most tangible item in American culture. Who cares if other developed countries use coins? The American attitude states that we use bills, and that makes us different, if not better.
Nevertheless, last week, the U.S. Mint announced their plan to try to bring the dollar coin into the mainstream. The Sacagawea dollar will be scrapped in order to make way for the Presidential Dollar Program. It's an idea in the same vein as the wildly popular State Quarter program, which has seen a resurgence in the coin collection hobby that can be clearly seen simply by watching the Home Shopping Network any time after midnight. Most of these offers defy all logic - no matter how I do the math, I can't ever see how ten quarters, even if they are really shiny, can be worth seventy-five dollars.
The plan to bring the dollar coin into the American way of life will be attempted by the Presidential Dollar Program, which will release four different gold dollars a year featuring the faces of United States Presidents. The dollars will be the same size and weight as the Sacagawea dollars, except that instead of featuring Lewis and Clark's tour guide, they will feature the image of a President. They will be released chronologically, starting with Washington in January 2007, with a new dollar coming out every three months.
At first, this seems like a decent idea. It seems like a good way to try to introduce the dollar coin into American culture and promote a sense of our nation's history as well. If successful, this program could potentially save the government billions of dollars and maybe someone will stop shouting over the national deficit a little less.
On the other hand, they're putting people on currency that probably don't deserve to be memorialized that way.
In fact, Grover Cleveland, since he was president twice, gets two whole dollars, when the man probably doesn't merit even one.
And does William Henry Harrison really garner a whole dollar? I'd suggest more around thirty cents; one cent for each day he was in office.
A problem might lie in putting these footnotes to history on our legal tender - we may end up right back where we were with Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea.
Write to Paul atpjmetz@bsu.edu.
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