Down With Dollars Up With Coins?
Coin collecting just got a little more interesting. As of January 31, 2012, a new piece of legislation was introduced into the Senate. The bill is called the Currency Optimization, Innovation, and National Savings (COINS) Act. COINS is a bipartisan bill that will remove all one dollar bills from circulation and replace them with one dollar coins.
Why on earth would they want to do this? Well, right now the Federal Reserve is sitting on $1.4 Billion in uncirculated dollar coins. The best approximations of how long these coins would last before demand dictated that they create more is as long as a decade. Can you imagine? $1.4 BILLION sitting in coin storage.
This plan was originally scrapped because the cost of producing coinage is far higher than that of producing dollar bills. However, in the long run, the lifespan of a dollar bill is only about 4.7 years. Conversely, the lifespan of a coin is close to twenty five years! It is estimated by the General Accounting Office that in producing the coins instead of the bills, the federal reserve could save between two hundred and five hundred million dollars per year! That’s a grand total of approximately six hundred billion dollars over the course of thirty years! That is a lot of savings just by switching over to $1 coins.
What’s your opinion?
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.Comments are closed.
Posted on: Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Posted in: coin supplies
Tags: Coin Collecting, coin storage