Swapping Dollar Coins For Bills Could Save $5.5 Billion, Gao

Ya...it's coming; this is right from government radio.

Now that the Kennedys are all out, the company in Mass that makes the paper for our money has lost their support in congress. They've been kicking this around for years. You don't think all those baby dollars got made by accident, do you?

The British and the Australians stopped printing one pound notes and one dollar notes decades ago, and replaced them with coins of the same value.

Coins are much cheaper than notes in the long run. The Oz. dollar coin has an average life of perhaps 20 years, the old paper one dollar note had an average life of 5 months.

I can't figure out why the U.S. not retired the one dollar note.

A few reasons:

*Politicians, particularly Trent Lott of Mississippi and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, have lobbied against eliminating the greenback because they represent the people who play a part in manufacturing and selling the paper needed to make banknotes to the government. Those businesses don't want to see themselves losing money because the government won't buy as much paper from them as it used to.

*Genuine customer (or in some cases, merchant) resistance; customers either think dollar coins aren't real when they are handed some in change or complain about how heavy it is in their pockets. Merchants don't like them because it messes up their counting of the tills at the end of the day and they don't hand them out as change to customers because they think customers will make a fuss about receiving something 'different.'

*Humans are a creature of habit. If you eliminate the paper dollar, which has been ingrained in Americans' brains as the basic unit of currency and a symbol of their purchasing power, it'd be like slapping tradition in the face.

I am not saying this at you silver but thost are stupid reasons.

Last time I checked, we (humans as a whole) are the only animals on earth that refuse to live with nature instead we just roll over it as if we can over come anything we will end up doing to it. (Sorry for going all green, but money isn't everything)

In that same article I read it said how much harder it is to counterfeit dollar coins compared to the paper dollar, I am not sure how true that is since I have never looked too much into it.

While this is true to an extent we also will conform to new trends and habits, cell phones have over taken house phones, internet has taken over for the printed news paper, and sooner or later all transactions will be through debit and credit cards, and we won't use money. (Not sure if it will happen in my lifetime, but if it does man our coin and paper money collections are going to be worth alot)

Sorry for the rant, I just get sick of stupid reasoning by the government for the things they do.

Um . . . what?
It escapes me how this is relevant to modern US coins? Could you please explain?

As a Canuck who has lived with circulating dollar coins for some time now, I can assure my American cousins it makes practically no difference in your day to day life. There's actually something to be said for rolling up common pocket change when a roll of loonies is 25 bucks :)

It's just one more coin to collect and debate over ....

Another classic example of greedy politicians wasting the money of taxpayers to line their own pockets.