Once more, with dead presidents

[ellarien]

The US Mint is going to have yet another go at dollar coins.

The coins will feature four different presidents a year, in order of service, finishing for some reason with Nixon in 2016. (The first report I saw just said that only deceased presidents would be featured, which left me wondering if Bill Clinton might end up being the only currently-ex president to miss the boat.)

I wonder if they'll actually catch on this time, or whether they'll become yet another curiosity item, only to be found in a few select vending machines. (Most of the SBA and Sacagewea dollars I own came out of a token machine on the Boston subway.) I suspect that as long as the authorities refuse to take dollar bills out of circulation, people will keep using them.

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Some commenters have suggested it will also be necessary to take a coin out of circulation, such as the cent or dime, to free up a space in coin drawers.

[ellarien]

I can see the argument as to which to throw overboard going either way, now that you mention it; pennies are almost useless clutter, but dimes are in a sense redundant -- you could always use two nickels instead, and not lose the ability to make up any given amount.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I understand the dime gets pointed at because it's the loss that leaves the smallest gap in the sequence. Lose the nickel and it's a factor of ten between cent and dime. Lose the quarter and it's ten between the dime and dollar. Lose the dime and it's only five between the nickel and the quarter.

When we decimalised in Britain, we went to a set of coins and notes that added up to a decade for every three jumps, and no more than two-and-a-half for the largest jump: 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, £1.00, £2.00 etc.

[ellarien]

That makes sense. I was thinking of additive rather than multiplicative gaps; I would have thought there was some desirability to being able to make up any arbitrary amount in coins, and in the US system you need the penny for that, because there's no 2 cent coin. (In practice, nobody really wants the 1 cent change or to be fussed with giving it; many cash registers have a 'take/leave a penny' cup, so the silly worthless things don't clog up the till too much.)

There is a downside to losing the dime from the additive point of view -- two nickels are quite a bit bulkier than one dime, even though they're both silver-coloured coins.