Getting rid of the dollar bill

[xiphias]

Congress is once again considering getting rid of the one-dollar bill, and it's about time. Our coinage is ridiculous at this point. We really ought to get rid of the dollar bill, the penny, and the nickel.

When we came up with our currency, the penny was the smallest coin we chose to have. And its buying power was about what a quarter is today. So, originally, we thought that the smallest amount of money that it was worth considering was a quarter. We'd do fine getting rid of everything below the quarter. This is what the cafeteria at Lis's work does; this is what the restaurant I used to work at did. And we did fine. There is no reason to deal with pennies, nickels, or even dimes.

(Why do we still have pennies? Because of the zinc lobby. Seriously. Pennies are mostly zinc, and the zinc lobby doesn't want to give up their major market.)

Now, down to dollar coins. Let's discuss video games.

The first video game shipped to bars and so forth was "Pong", in 1972 which cost 25 cents a play. That was the price point of pinball games at that point, too. The buying power of a quarter in 1972 was about $1.38 in today's money.

So, if coin-operated video games (which DO still exist, to an extent) cost a dollar a play, it'd still be a deal. And, for that, we'd need dollar coins.

The only argument I've ever heard in favor of dollar bills is that you can stuff them into strippers' garter belts. However, the dollar being stuffed into a strippers' garter belt was already a thing by the early Seventies -- and the buying power of a dollar then was similar to the buying power of a five today, which means that it is high time that strippers started getting paid in fives instead of singles. Just sayin'.

Comments

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

All of the work vending machines where I work were changed to only accept dollar bills about 6-9 months ago. All prices where changed to $1 for everything. You can not use coins in those vending machines anymore, only $1 bills. I've seen this change in other places as well: vending machines switched to accept paper money only and no coins, and prices raised to the nearest dollar amount. I have a bad feeling eliminating the $1 bill and going to a $1 coin is going to backfire.

[goljerp]

Well, it's not like $1 bills would be illegal or anything; there could be a transition period when vending machine companies (and others) could transition. But I don't really think the vending machine industry should be allowed to have a veto on a proposal which otherwise would save the US a lot of money (it costs more than $0.01 to produce a penny, and coins are far more durable and last longer than paper money) and make a lot of sense.