Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 4, 1995 TAG: 9505050027
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yet there they go again - proposing to mint a new $1 coin to replace the familiar $1 bill.
Have they learned nothing from the Susan B. Anthony debacle - the $1 coin introduced in 1979, which the American public concluded wasn't worth a plug nickel?
Granted, it's not as though the change would make no sense. Paper bills last, on average, 17 months, during which time they become so dirty, wrinkled, worn and generally yucky that they must be shredded and reprinted at a cost of 4 cents each. By contrast, coins cost only 8 cents to mint and they last 30 or more years. Replacing the $1 greenback with a $1 coin would save the government an estimated $100 million over five years - a mintful.
The $1 coin, those who have a yen for it also say, would prove a great convenience for those riding buses, washing clothes at Laundromats, parking at meters, making long-distance calls from phone booths, and buying cigarettes from vending machines.
What they don't tell you is:
Health-care costs will rise. Due to the additional weight of coins in women's pocketbooks - already burdensome enough to cause slump-shoulderedness and joint illnesses - many women will become totally disabled for purposes of heavy lifting. As for those who carry currency in fannypacks, we don't even want to think about the potential for injuries.
This is a plot devised by mens-wear manufacturers. Bulging with $1 coins, the pockets of men's trousers will wear out 10 times faster than they do already. Some may pretend their interest is in saving cows that otherwise will be slaughtered for leather wallets. But people still would have to carry wallets for denominations larger than a buck. And more cows will die to make industrial-strength belts to hold up men's trousers - already drooping so low under some beer guts as to risk indecent exposure.
Gender wars will take a new, possibly violent, turn. Some males, for reasons impossible to fathom, enjoy testing how loudly, how long, and with how annoying an effect they can absent-mindedly jingle coins in their pockets. This habit will become more pronounced with $1 coins, possibly inciting females to crack the skulls of habitual offenders with their new lethal weapons: pocketbooks.
If these were not reasons enough to oppose this change now pending in Congress, consider the political debate sure to ensue as to whose picture would go on the $1 coin. Doesn't this country suffer enough malaise without having to confront, more often than we do already, Newt Gingrich's grinning countenance?
To be sure, many other countries have accepted the U.S. equivalent of a $1 coin with relative good grace. This, however, is America. With all our will, we shall resist anyone trying to take away our greenbacks.
by CNB