Dollar Coins

Yesterday I was handed my first examples of the new dollar coin, with the Statue of Liberty on one side and James Monroe on the other. I like the idea of dollar coins, but these Presidential coins are very disappointing. They are so thin and light that they feel like cheap tin imitations, and the color also has the cheap sheen of stainless steel instead of the gleam of precious metal. (According to the US mint, they are 88.5% copper, 6% zinc, 3.5% manganese and 2% nickle.)

I'm also a little disappointed that I got a Monroe instead of a Millard Fillmore. Perhaps the treasurer of 7-11 is a neocon who dispatched a few million Monroe coins to his stores to promote aggressive foreign policy?

And it can't say much about the success of the program that I am receiving my first examples three years after the Washington dollar was released. What they should do is abolish the dollar bill, but we are too conservative about our money to do that. Even more they need to abolish the penny, which costs the government billions a year to produce something that is essentially worthless. I suppose they don't because the cranky conservatives who always think the government is up to no good will protest furiously that this is a plot to tax us more by rounding up the sales tax, or some even more nefarious scheme -- perhaps a mind-control ray that is impeded by the zinc-copper alloy in pennies? -- and it is worth a few billion a year to avoid that sort of squabble.