Dollar coin isn’t a good ‘change’

Published 9:24 pm Monday, August 26, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

Pretty much everything that’s wrong with government today can be summed up in that dollar coin in your pocket. Oh. You don’t have one? You’ve never seen one? You’ve rarely even heard of one?

Our point exactly. The dollar coin is a government initiative Americans don’t want and can’t afford. The only people who think it’s a good idea are the lobbyists being paid to do so.

“The American people might be surprised to learn that for the past 20 years a handful of lobbyists and lawmakers — mostly from states with mining and metal-processing interests — have been pushing a proposal to take away dollar bills, and force the public to use metal coins instead,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week. “The most recent attempt is the Currency Optimization, Innovation and National Savings (Coins) Act, sponsored by Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa). This proposed law would prohibit the issuance of dollar bills after five years and replace them with dollar coins.”

Even people who have heard of dollar coins (or have received one as change from a vending machine) don’t like them.

“Reliable polling data show that the vast majority of Americans prefer the dollar bill to dollar coins,” the Journal explains. “The Federal Reserve already holds over a billion dollars worth of $1 coins in storage due to the fact that people simply don’t want to use them.”



So why the new push to do away with dollar bills? It’s certainly not cost. No matter what proponents of dollar coins say, it’s still cheaper to print money than to coin money.

The Journal says that to answer that question, follow the money.

“The advocacy group promoting the Coins Act has the same address as PMX Industries, a South Korean firm located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that supplies the U.S. Mint with the metal used to make dollar coins,” it notes.

That company and its CEO donated $500,000 in 2011 to the Sen. Tom Harkin Institute of Public Policy at Iowa State University.

Perhaps a more compelling argument against dollar coins is made by The Atlantic, that august magazine that has published the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The argument is pants.

“I am strict believer that there is no better feeling in this world than coming home after work, taking off real pants and putting on a pair of sweats,” The Atlantic’s Alexander Abad-Santos writes. “There is, moreover, a direct connection between happiness and the speed at which real pants come off. A pocket full of dollar coins would make this process obnoxious and, perhaps, lead to a diminishment of happiness among people who suddenly find themselves scrambling around the floor for lost dollar coins instead of kicking back in their sweats, watching ‘Seinfeld’ reruns. We can’t have that, obviously.”

Obviously.

Arguments against dollar coins clearly outweigh arguments for the coins. Yet Congress persists. That pretty well sums up what’s wrong with government these days. We have a government that’s determined to fix problems that don’t exist, no matter what we say.