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.
