Money, money, money
15 July 2018

Wish I had more but that is not why I am writing this.  I am concerned about US coinage.  There have been several attempts at creating a usable silver dollar. The earliest, in Nevada, had wide spread use for a while and having spent some of my earliest days in Reno, I had use of those silver dollars, also known as “cartwheels” since there were so big. In fact, I used to carry around so many of them that there were constantly wearing holes in the pockets of my jeans.

Fast forward a few years now to the abortive attempt at a smaller coin.  Unfortunately, it was almost as small as a quarter and people kept getting them confused.  Next up – the Golden Dollar.  Same size but the gold color, or so it was thought, would do the trick and people would not get confused.  Unfortunately, in this country people seem to get confused easily and wouldn’t really look at the coin(s) they were using to pay for something.  So, while they are still minted, they are difficult to come by.  I prefer the coin to the paper dollar, so I have a suggestion.  The fifty-cent peace is now even a rarer coin, so I would suggest to the mint that if they are still minting them that they stop and create a new dollar coin the size of the old fifty-cent piece.  There shouldn’t be any more confusion about coin size or denomination.  There might be one other problem however.  The cash registers that merchants use may only have slots for pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.  If there is a fifth slot they probably utilize it for the coin denomination most frequently used.

This is so silly. The constant printing of paper dollars costs the US Mint more than it would to mint longer lasting dollar coins. As for merchants, well, there is probably no hope there although merchants of old did handle fifty-cent pieces on a regular basis so why can’t they do it now?