Well the treasury is back to take another swing at the dollar coin. This time they won’t feature women like Susan B. Anthony or Sacagawea they’ll feature presidents… you know the old standards we all love— Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. Every year there will be four new dead white guys to choose from! Sadly, we will all have to wait until 2016 for the treasure of treasures Richard “victory fingers” Nixon. If you want to see when your favorite president comes out (or see when they served) you can look at the release schedule. 
Polls are reporting that there is still no love for dollar coins as currency though, despite the fact that doing such would save the government hundred of millions of dollars each year. If we are to believe the AP article that I just linked to, there are still tons of the ill-fated Sacagawea dollar coins cluttering up the US Mint. So, why make a ton more? Clearly there must be a reason. We can only hope that the US Mint doesn’t think that a man’s likeness will be able to sell the coin better.
The problem with these coins are that people don’t think of them as money, they are like baseball cards and comics— collectible. The morning the Sacagawea coin was released people bought them by the roll and never spent one of them, making them both worthless as a collectible and useless as a currency. And even though they aren’t collectible they are still thought of as a collectible and more than a currency. Releasing four different dollar coins year until 2016 is sure to land the new dollar coins right along side Susan and Sacagawea, that is the corner of a sock drawer or lining the bottom of a security box.
Also, if you are afraid if the US Mint decided to stop pressing women’s faces into metal, fear not. This year there will be an equally (if not much more) useless ten dollar gold coin with the president’s spouses carved into them (making it eleven dollars per couple). Why the spouses? Well, we all know that the most important women in America are the ones that married presidents. Right?
One Comment
I actually collect these coins myself and I don’t really care who is on the coin as long as it looks nice.
[non sequitur website pitch removed, link's attached to his name anyway]
Thanx
Andray~