There’s a lot of chatter out there that the debt reduction “super committee” isn’t getting the results it should be, especially with the clock running out on their time to cut the requisite $1.5 trillion from the budget. However, I think we need to give credit where it’s due. The super committee has one truly Herculean accomplishment under its belt; it has managed to identify an issue that Americans of all political stripes – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents – all agree on.

The issue? It’s a proposal to ditch the dollar bill in favor of a new dollar coin being advanced by a pair of Congressmen from copper-producing states. The bill purports to save the taxpayers an estimated $5.5 billion…over 30 years. Even those miniscule cost savings were thoroughly debunked in a recent USA Today op-ed, which states that “[t]he GAO report itself admits that factors outside the scope of financial benefit to the government were not considered, including the impact on private businesses and banks, and the costs of transferring, distributing, storing, authenticating and managing dollar coins.”

Just when it seemed like this proposed legislation couldn’t make any less sense, recent polling shows that voters are nearly united against the idea of replacing a bill with a coin. A survey performed by Lincoln Park Strategies for Americans for George found that:

•76 percent of Americans oppose doing away with the dollar bill, with that number representing a fairly equal share of Republicans, Democrats and Independents and voters from all regions of the country.

•45 percent of Americans believe that phasing out the dollar bill will have a net negative effect on the economy, versus just 10 percent who believe it will have a positive effect.

•75 percent of Americans view the dollar coin as both unwanted and unnecessary. (more…)

The United States federal government faces some daunting economic challenges. From the debt to the deficit to our credit rating to joblessness, we are staring down the barrel of a gun, economically speaking. There are occasional signs that Washington is beginning to get serious about addressing these problems, such as the emergence of Rep. Paul Ryan as the intellectual force behind conservative economic policy. Sadly, there are just as many, probably many more, examples that Washington doesn’t get it.

Place the latest effort to shred the paper dollar and replace it permanently with the dollar coin in the latter category.

As the Hill puts it, “Rep. David Schweikert (Ariz.) and two other House Republicans — including supercommittee co-chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) — introduced legislation last week aimed at retiring the paper dollar. Schweikert said his bill would save billions of dollars over the next few decades by transitioning to a dollar coin in four years, or as soon as $600 million worth of dollar coins are in circulation.”

Schweikert should be commended for thinking imaginatively about how to save taxpayers money. But in this case he’s being a little too imaginative. Imposing the unpopular dollar coin on an unwilling American public (previous dollar coin mandates have flopped) – and more importantly, small businesses – will actually increase costs on American taxpayers. In fact, it already is.

The current, more reserved mandate has done nothing to spur the use of dollar coins. Instead these coins are handed out as change by the Post Office and DC Metro stations and customers almost immediately give them to their children as trinkets. As the Washington Times pointed out in a recent editorial, “This utterly wasteful program is costing us a billion, and it’s a perfect example of why this country is going bankrupt.”

(more…)