More Bus Token Money

McALLEN — Ike masterminded the liberation of Europe, but just couldn’t conquer Americans’ attachment to the paper bill.

Susan B. Anthony rallied the country to grant women equal rights, but she couldn’t convince it to believe the dollar was just as good on a coin.

And Sacagawea led Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Pacific, but couldn’t guide Americans toward a $1 coin.

Can the collective gusto of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson complete the job where the others failed?

After three failed attempts, the U.S. Mint hopes so, planning to use 36 dead presidents to finally get a dollar coin to "pass the buck" with the American people.

Today, the Mint is slated to begin circulating a new gold-colored $1 coin featuring the face of George Washington, the country’s first president.

comments:

The reason that these forgeries don't catch on with people is that folks inherently know the difference between base metal and real money like silver and gold and even knickel.
People pyscologically don't want to have a pocket full of bus tokens, it doesnt feel like money.

But paper isn't money either, I can hear people saying. That is true, it isn't.

And originally people didn't trust it either, but over generations it has come to be accepted by the public.

Silver dollars and half dollars are rarely in circulation these days because they are worth more than the face value of the coin, but earlier in my lifetime it was quite common to get a silver dollar in change and fifty cent pieces were even more common, though they weren't all silver.

Most nickels and dimes that are in circulation are knickel and copper, though they are being fastly replaced with zinc coins now.

It is very easy to tell the difference, they feel fake.

And take a look at a new penny, it is so thin, because it costs the government more than 1 cent to manufacture them. They will cease to be minted soon.People are melting pennies now for the metal content because of the rise in the price of copper over the last few years.

The constitution says that money shall be minted from gold or silver, because these two metals have been accepted as currency for thousands of years. So even if the government behind the money fails the coinage still maintains its value. After all, people spend millions of dollars raising gold and silver coins from shipwrecks. You've never heard of an expedition seeking to raise paper money from the ocean floor.

Somewhere along the line, the government began to substitute nickel for silver and then copper filling. So people began to hoard silver dollars and they began to dissappear from circulation. With the advent of coins being minted in zinc, the nickel/copper coins are beginning to be hoarded as well, because even nickel and copper have an inherent value as metals alone.

The task of the government now is not so much to replace the dollar bill with a coin, as much as it is to get younger generations adjusted to money being minted in zinc. A generation that grows up toting around bus tokens in their pocket will come to percieve worthless pot metal as money, and therefore the government will incur no cost at all when it comes to minting their currency.