Are $2 Coins Viable In Usa?

I can't really see any reason to keep the pretty much worthless 1c coin in circulation, Lets face it the coin itself is made out zinc which has a very limited lifespan anyway.
As for the $1 and $2 notes What can you actually buy with these now ?
In reality anything under $5 is small change and should be coinage instead of notes.
Yes coins do cost more to produce initially but as long as they are not made out of zinc they should be useful for many years as opposed to a paper note's limited lifespan and will prove to be more cost effective.
The savings for the US taxpayers would amount to Billions of dollars in a fairly short timespan.
The ONLY thing stopping this is an unfounded and unreasonable fear of "Change" and the lilly livered attitude of the elected politicians that lack the moral fortitude to impose these needed changes.

Is there anything more inefficient than the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the United States Mint run by the Treasurer of the United States?

a) Over 300 billion zinc pennies in 34 years.
b) Nickels that cost more than 5 cents to make
c) Fifty cent coins that are too heavy to be useful
d) Dollar coins that are sitting in warehouses.
e) Dollar bills by the tonne, that wear through quickly.
f) Two dollar bills that have 1.5 billion in circulation that are hoarded.
g) Fifty dollar bills that are way underutilized.
h) Massive production problems with the color c-note. Have you noticed that they only made 140.8 million of the 2013 series (Rios-Lew signatures) in the first half of FY2015 and then stopped making them completely.

What other department in the federal government can claim that most of their product is useless?

Today I have around fifty dollars of folding money in my pocket.
If it were coins at one dollar , two and five dollar I would have lost my pants somewhere.

in other words I like this thing called folding money.

If anyone was stupid enough to carry $50 in change they probably deserve to loose their pants.
In Aus 1x $50 bill would do the job and if you spent a dollar of that you would end up with 3x notes 2x $20 and a $5 and 2x $2 coins that weigh in at a whopping 13.2g, In Canada the same would apply.

This BS excuse that the coins would be too heavy to carry around is pretty stupid and lame, I can assure you that I carry more than $50 around with me at any one time and I have never needed to wear a belt on my pants.
This is probably because I haven't got the 1c and $1/$2 notes to clog up my pockets with

Maybe nothing in a big city, but they still can go a long way at a garage sale/flea market swap meet/Ham fest etc. At least the garage sales I go to (quite a few), prices get rounded to .25, .50 or 1.00 as the unwritten go-to standards.

As just one example, last summer I got two complete tap and die sets for 1.00 each at garage sales. A goose-neck fluorescent bulb desk lamp was also a dollar. I could goon, but won't.

I don't know if you are in a city, but something I have seen all my life (this is NOT a negative comment!) is city people tend to be so busy in their own, busy world that they don;t have a concept that life is very different in non-urban areas. There is a large world outside urban borders and it runs by a completely different set of operations.

@Trout



That's a pretty definitive statement about our government from someone who is literally from the other side of the world (in a great country I would love to visit!). Now if you grew up here and understand our culture to the depth needed to understand all the (American specific) ramifications of eliminating a bill, then that's a different story.

A lot of the entire issue has to do with Americans being proud, to a unique degree, of being able to have their personal preferences voted for by the people they elect to do so.

Americans have overwhelmingly said no to dollar coins, and I believe there are elected officials who realize stopping something this important to Americans as a whole would only serve to help shorten the length of that elected officials political career. Politicians have seen Americans reject the dollar coins many times over, and so realize that overwhelmingly, we don't want the option of using bills.

Americans are not going to adopt them en mass unless the government pulls a dictatorial move and forces them on us. Tyrannical actions are something many Americans perceive as being a very non-American way for the government to act. In a smaller way, the elimination of dollar bills reminds me of the current administrations coercion into their "healthcare" system. Elected officials are not looking for more reasons for Americans to be angry with them right now.


I agree the situation would be a moral dilemma if the American people wanted only coins, and yet Congress was playing favorites to businesses who profit from making paper bills.

And I know that people who want to get rid of the bills say the only reason we don't eliminate paper is b/c Congress actually is playing favorites to businesses. But I don't remember any actual data to back up the playing-favorites idea.

So I am asking - is there factual evidence to back the above idea? Or is it simply hearsay made out of frustration at wanting something badly enough to assume/fabricate the idea? I don't know.


Morality is not as issue also since:
1. The dollar amounts saved on paper do not match what we thought originally would be the tremendous savings,

2. Because the alleged savings were only looking at what the government said it would save on taxpayer money without figuring in the cost inevitable cost hikes (as per previous post in this thread and also from witnessing this very thing in Canada when the Loonie came out), and since

3. American elected officials are, to a unique degree, supposed to do the will of the American people (exactly the opposite of eliminating the bills) ,

Where is the lack of "morality?" What am I missing here?

Another thing I am genuinely interested, and please see this as the honest, friendly question it is meant to be - typing does not allow me to express my total lack of negative attitude - why does this matter so much to you?

If you have roots here, your interest makes sense to me. If not, I find it interesting someone from so far away cares about what we use for money over here. I am not sure under what circumstances I would be as interested in another country's choices of specie/currency.

I have NO idea why the penny and the $1 and $2 bills are SO important to some Americans.
Maybe that pocket full of penny's and that thick $20 wad of dollar bills in the wallet gives some people a false sense of Affluence, I don't know.
What I do know is that they are outdated and expensive to produce.

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This is absolutely true. Commerce is conducted on a largely different basis in rural areas such as where I live. And, in fact, even in not too far-off Tucson (a city with a population actually larger than that of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami to name but a few) this is to a significant degree also so. There are still many entire regions in the U.S. where the practical economy resembles the urban ones of New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, or the District of Columbia not in the least.