The armored car industry? They’re fans of the old school dollar bill:
The armored-car industry also opposes the coin. “It’s primarily based on weight,” Larry Sabbath of the National Armored Car Association says. “If you think of all our trucks carrying around that weight, that’s obviously higher fuel costs for us, and more breakdown of trucks.”
A familiar name is pushing for the change to shiny coins, however:
You have this gigantic deficit. You have this supercommittee, and Congress is looking for savings anywhere they can,” says former representative Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., a longtime coin advocate.
The move to a coin would cost money in the short term, but eventually save money because paper currency lasts about 42 months — while coins theoretically last forever. Moving to a coin could save $5.6 billion over 30 years, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“You’re not going to find that kind of savings that involves no tax increase and no cut to anybody’s program,” Kolbe says…
When Kolbe first started introducing $1 coin proposals in Congress in 1986, it was a way to help Arizona mining interests, he admits. Those proposals never got out of committee. Now, with most other Western economies replacing their lowest paper bill with coins, the time is right to modernize the currency system, he says.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2011.
Not exactly, we are not focusing on the penny, the lack of $2 bills circulating at high volume,
50 cent pieces, the feel of the $1 coin like a quarter, the susie’s b that look like it too, Eisenhower dollars, and commodity prices and counterfeiting. All of that are factors which will reduce the savings by the bill, nevertheless, given inflation a quarter may have been worth a $1 just 20-30 years ago, same would be true with the dime, and we’ve had bills for quite a long time as well as dollar coins, the current ones tarnish easily too, imagine discontinuing the bill for the susie b’s or eisenhowers.