And Now For Something Competely Different!

Instead of rationalizing the US coinage system by getting rid of the penny and possibly other coins down the road we should look into other alternatives.

Once the penny is dead and buried, we will be using basically 3 coins, the nickel, dime and quarter. This system has 2 nickels to the dime, 2 dimes and a nickel to the quarter (or 5 nickels, or 3 nickels and a dime) and then 4 quarters to the dollar. Seems simple enough.

But this is America, darn it! We cannot have simple; it just will not do! We need complications. After all we spell thru with a bunch of extra letters, we have multiple levels of government from the city, township, county, state and federal systems and some states that consider themselves as de facto independent nations (I'm looking at you Texas and California!) Why keep things simple with 3 coins when we can be like the British and have more.

Even the United Kingdom (or is it Britain, England or Great Britain?) had, back in 1971, rationalized their coinage by converting to the same decimal system as had been used in the USA for 2 centuries. 100 Pennies into the Pound, with fractional coinage like the Two Penny, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p coins as well as the 1- and 2-Pound coins in use these days. That's 8 coins used every day. That's twice as many as we Americans use today, even with the penny. Sure, we also have a half dollar and dollar coin, but no one ever uses them and they might as well not exist.

Let's have some fun with our coinage and emulate the old British (English/UK/Great Britain or whatever) system. Let's reinvent the US coinage with some pizazz!

First, let's keep the penny, after all we have had it since 1792. Sure, it can't buy anything these days, but then neither can the nickel or dime (and maybe even the quarter) but who cares? But then we will make 12 pennies the Schilling, but being Americans, we have to call it a different name. Let's say we call it the "Doze", since 12 is still a dozen, even in America, it fits. Since it will replace the Dime, it would be sort of similar but different.

So now we have the Penny and the Doze, 2 Doze would be a Dice, then let's make 5 Doze become the Crown, but again, since we are 'Merikans' and we have no crown here so we will call it the "President".

Thus, the Dollar would have 240 Pennies, or 20 Doze, or 10 Dice or 2 Presidents. Keeping with tradition we would have to have a Half as well, but this would be a Half-Penny, not the dollar. The half dollar coin is now called the Roosevelt, but I hadn't told you that yet. We also need a 2-penny coin, let's call it a Tupper. (That would make the container that holds Tuppers "Tupperware".) We can have a 3-penny coin as well, so we will call that the Thrupper.

For our larger value coins, we have already introduced the President, which is ¼ of a dollar. We need a half dollar, because why not? We need a snazzy name for it though. Since it is twice the value of a President, let's call it a Roosevelt. Since he was elected twice as often as any other president, he should be so honored.

So this makes 11 coins. If we make the 6 lowest denominations of a brass alloy based on weights (a Doze weighing the same as 24 Half-Pennies, 12 Pennies, 6 Tuppers etc. and so on) and the highest 5 denominations in a silver-colored nickel or steel alloy, again with weights proportional to relative value then one could just separate coins by the two colors and weigh them to come up with the value of the entire batch.

So now we have our basic coins:
"Brass"
• Half-Penny (½ Penny)
• Penny (1 Penny)
• Tupper (2 Pennies)
• Thrupper (3 Pennies)
• Half Doze (6 Pennies, 3 Tuppers, 2 Thruppers)
• Doze (12 Pennies, 6 Tuppers, 4 Thruppers)

"Silver"
• Dice (24 Pennies/2 Doze)
• President (60 Pennies/5 Doze/Quarter Dollar)
• Roosevelt (120 Pennies, 10 Doze, 2 Presidents)
• Dollar (240 Pennies, 20 Doze, 4 Presidents, 2 Roosevelts)
• Double Dollar (480 Pennies, 40 Doze, 8 Presidents, 4 Roosevelts, 2 Dollars)

With 11 coins we could well serve all the politicians by having one coin with the only Independent president (Washington) and 5 obverse and 5 reverse designs chosen by Democrats and 5 each by Republicans. To keep the politicians on their toes let's have the Democrats chose the reverse designs of the coins in which the Republicans choose the obverse for and vice-versa.

If we really wanted to make the US coinage simple we could, but we don't want simple, we want to make sure every special interest is satisfied. Nickel, Zinc and copper producers want to sell their materials so we want to buy them since they have great lobbyists. The problem is however that common sense (or is it common cents?) doesn't come easy these days.