And I’ll also quote from this article, which I’ve linked to before:
The Government Accountability Office estimates that the government could save more than $500 million a year by using the dollar coin exclusively, since it’s more durable than the dollar bill and offers the Mint a big profit on every one it makes. […]
The Government Accountability Office concluded in 2002 that a $1 coin probably could not succeed unless the government pulled the $1 bill from circulation. That’s probably impossible politically, but Schatz says the government could certainly do more to help the coin.
As far as I can tell, the argument against these changes amounts to “change baaaad!”
Wait, now I’m getting mixed messages.
LOL!
Weight of $100 in dollar coins: approximately 860 grams.
Weight of $100 in bills: approximately 1 gram.
I think that a mass ratio of more than 850 to 1 constitutes an argument against the abolition of one form of currency in favor of another that reaches a level higher than “change bad”.
But I appreciate the pun.
One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve moved to Canada is that I find less money on the ground. In the states, it wouldn’t be unusual to find a stray dollar every now and then. Things fall out of people’s pockets all the time, including money. But here in the Great White with its dollar coin, when one drops money, one hears it hitting the ground. So less money is lost.
I found a fiver on the ground once, so I know it still happens. It just happens to be less likely to go unnoticed with a pocketful of coins over paper.
What does weight have to do with it? Nobody carries around $100 in coins. Or in $1 bills, for that matter.
Are you talking about the transportation of large amounts of currency? While coins are heavier, they are far, far easier to package, especially when you consider $1 that have been in circulation for a while. If we’re talking about transporting new currency, there’s also the fact that there would be less need for new $1 coins, as they can last decades, while bills last, what, weeks?
Uh…
I run the front desk for a small weekly blues dance event. We keep extra cash on hand from week to week so we can make change for people as they pay their admission ($8/$5 for students).
Tonight’s starting cash was $80 in ones and $100 in fives. Too many ones for a low-attendance week, but we’ve had weeks where we needed it. The much better-attended dance on Friday nights does a hefty take wholly in cash – I’m sure they start with more than $100 in ones in their cash box.
I’m for moving from paper bills to dollar coins, but to say “no one carries $100 in ones” is patently absurd.
What does weight have to do with it? Nobody carries around $100 in coins. Or in $1 bills, for that matter.
I had a whole paragraph of snark here, but it’s superfluous. I think most people are going to recognize that carrying $100 around, however denominated, is something that actually happens relatively frequently rather than something that nobody does.
Nobody does carry around $100 in coins right now, usually, other than change machine owners – because we have paper money, which is WAY LIGHTER. People carry around $100 in bills all the time. Your assertion they don’t is bizarre.
Are you talking about the transportation of large amounts of currency? While coins are heavier, they are far, far easier to package, especially when you consider $1 that have been in circulation for a while. If we’re talking about transporting new currency, there’s also the fact that there would be less need for new $1 coins, as they can last decades, while bills last, what, weeks?
Coins are not far easier to package. Even if they were, the added “hassle” of stacking paper money is absolutely swamped in convenience and practicality terms by the weight differential.
Paper bills last one or two years depending on use. People rarely see excessively worn bills because any that return to a bank in bad condition are removed from circulation, pulped, and recycled. There is little waste; few bills wear away to tatters and escape the stream, since there’s so much incentive to just take in a worn bill and trade it for a good one.
Coins last about 25 years according to the US Mint. Worn coins are similarly recycled but there is significantly more loss, since many people will allow worn coins to collect in jars or throw them away rather than seek redemption on such a small amount.
Environmentally I believe the impact of paper currency is much less significant, particularly if we were to switch away from paper currency and require the transport of millions of dollars in coinage instead of currency. (Think of the gas costs! Those armored cars get crappy mileage as it is.) Paper currency requires us to grow cotton. Coinage requires us to tear the tops off of mountains.
I like coins but I think the practical arguments actually go the other way; we should be dropping coins and switching to all paper money. Few things cost less than a dollar anymore.
I think that a mass ratio of more than 850 to 1 constitutes an argument against the abolition of one form of currency in favor of another
Nonsense! The heavier weight of the coins will cause people to use more energy carrying their money around and combat the obesity epidemic (/snark).
Pennies are utterly useless. The people asking for spare change on the street don’t even want them. The streets of Manhattan are paved with copper from where the pennies got pounded into the street because no one bothered to pick them up. We need to go to rounding to the nearest 5 cents, if not 10 or 25 cents. And go to dollar coins. What other country prints paper money of as little value as the dollar bill? (Hmm…maybe Mexico? Not sure what the peso’s worth these days. Or China. I’m pretty sure most first world countries start the paper at higher denominations.)
I’ll concede that replacing dollar bills with dollar coins makes financial sense. But the American public has had access to both for years and clearly prefers the bills. Why should the government force coins onto the American public when it doesn’t want them? The government is supposed to serve us, not rule us.
OTOH, I can live without pennies, and I’d bet that most people would feel the same.
I lived for a while in a country where there were the equivalent of dollar coins, and no equivalent of dollar bills. It did not make me happy. You know those times when you are buying something that costs $5, so you hand the cashier a $10 bill and expect to get a $5 bill back, but there are no $5 bills in the drawer, so you get 5 $1 bills instead? Think of that happening with coins. Or when you pull out your wallet and give someone a $5 bill because you’re not sure how much an item is going to cost, but it turns out you had enough singles to pay for it, but instead of using them up you get more of them back? And you know how, if you are female, you don’t have many pockets you can put a bunch of coins into, so you have to put them into a change purse or the little snap-shut change part of your wallet? Well, you start not being able to close the change purse, it’s so full of coins. Whereas the same number of bills would fit into your wallet easily. The weight of the coins is trivial compared to their volume. I never minded using the occasional dollar coin when I lived in NYC and they circulated fairly widely, but not having the option of paper dollars makes a significant difference in convenience.
I don’t know – I’ve lived in a country without dollar bills my whole life, and while on the odd occasion I’ve found myself carrying more coins than I want, it’s always been because of pennies and nickles, and never in my recollection dollar coins. Because of that, I’ve gotten pretty adept at knowing how about much change I have and paying in a way that minimizes the change I get back. Considering I’ve been practicing that my whole life, it’s not a terrible inconvenient.
What was inconvenient was travelling to the US and having to use non-colour coded money, so I was forever handing over the wrong denomination, mis-guessing how much I actually had on me, and holding up lines while I sorted through my wallet, looking for a fiver among ones and twenties.
Convenience is pretty relative to familiarity.
Paper money stores easily in a hip wallet.
Coins need to be in a pocket or a special coin purse.
Having lived in Canada (with $1 and $2 coins) I vastly prefer the U.S. system, because “not wanting to carry change around” does not mean that you have to buy things in $5 increments, or that you have to deal with very valuable handfuls of change.
Pennies should be eliminated, though. Nickels, too. That would save a lot more money than switching the dollar.
On the few occasions that one dollar coins have been available to me, I’ve much preferred them to bills. They’re easier to locate in one’s pocket, they’re less likely to be rejected by various vending machines and so on.
Which you’d rather use is a matter of preference. If you’ve had the experience of using dollar coins as well as dollar bills.
Jadey, I’ll bet that if the U.S. tries to go to color-coded money someone sues the government on the basis that it’s discriminating against the color-blind.
Seconding Jadey – coins vs bills is purely a matter of familiarity and owning the right kind of wallet.
@RonF: While your comment made me laugh, it’s much more likely that the banking lobby will block it, due to the expenses it would incur in replacing machines designed to recognize money, operations, etc.
Loose change stinks. If your wallet has a change purse, it deforms the wallet. If you stuff it in your pocket, it falls out. If you carry a separate change purse, that’s another mass in your already-crowded pockets of cellphone/wallet/keys.
That said, it would be nice to see coin-acceptors on vending machines again – bill feeders are terrible.
I just have one condition: it has to be green on one side, so currency exchanges can still call the American dollar the greenback.
I use an Altoids tin for my change. And carry a purse.
The cynic in me expects that someone, somewhere, has made a major crux of their argument against eliminating the dollar bill, “but you can’t stuff coins into a stripper’s g-string.” Because that is just kind of how my month is going, between street harassment and the filibuster of DADT repeal and etc.
One of the ways that Canada handled the inconvenience of too many dollar coins is to introduce the toonie. Change for a five becomes two toonies and one loonie instead of the five separate dollar coins some folks are imagining. Further, when I’ve worked registers, I’ve noticed that the Canadian till is five-heavy and toonie heavy. Tens are relatively incidental. So concerns about unweildy amounts of change are easily handled by establishments shifting their till configurations.
Loose change stinks. If your wallet has a change purse, it deforms the wallet.
Only if you have a wallet that’s more suited to holding large numbers of bills rather than change. (I own two wallets – one for use in the USA, one for use everywhere else.)
Whenever this coins vs bills argument comes up I catch a whiff of the idea that America is sooper-special and efficiencies that work perfectly well for the entire rest of the world just wouldn’t be possible here.
We have a one dollar coin in Australia, and as far as I know, we haven’t suffered for it. But then again, I don’t think we would suffer with a one dollar bill either.
But the video wasn’t about the dollar coin or the dollar bill, it was about the stupidity of the penny, and I think we all agree, the penny is a stupid thing.
In Australia, we don’t have a penny – we have no coin or paper note for any unit of currency worth less than 5 cents. All prices are rounded to the nearest five cents, except when you are buying in bulk.
I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this system over the penny system. Simply put, I could not care less about saving a couple of cents here and there. And since stores in Australia have taken the “nearest 5c” pricing structure into account, and since it is common to buy many products at once when you are in a supermarket, for every shopping cart of stuff that we buy, we MIGHT lose one or two cents, and frankly, I couldn’t care less about losing one or two cents. It saves time at the checkout, it means the mint doesn’t have to print one cent pieces, it saves space in my wallet and frankly it’s just a good idea.
When the Australian government proposed this change decades ago, there was a sentimental uproar amongst certain sectors of the population who were adamant that getting rid of the one cent coin would spell doom and gloom and result in the destruction of the economy and high prices for consumers. Those predictions did not come to pass.
It worked in Australia, and our dollar is worth just about the same as the US dollar these days. It will work in the US. It will, and in the end, you’ll all be much much happier for it.
Oh and about money for the disabled – In Australia, all coins are shaped differently and come in different sizes and have different edging to help the blind find the right coins. All notes are of different sizes as well.
And our paper money is polymer based – it doesn’t degrade in the wash, it makes in much, much harder to counterfeit and it lasts ages and doesn’t crumple as easily. This has made our money far more durable and secure and it saves the government money because they don’t have to reprint bills to replace those that get damaged.
@Thene – as a guy, Canadian money is a PITA for the reasons I outlined. Maybe it would be better if I started carrying a shoulder-bag, but it’s a hard habit to get into.
It’s not like you have to go to Europe to experience dollar coins. And as mentioned upthread, Canada has the $2 coin (formerly $2 bill) that mitigates the problem….
But then again, I doubt Canadian stores are selling change-friendly wallets, since Canada is stuck to the American market.
Another problem with American (US) money: It stinks. No, that’s not an attack on the US economic system or commentary on social problems brought on by the excessively libertarian ethos in the US. I mean it literally: money printed in the US has a light, unpleasant odor to it. The coins don’t, at least not that I can detect. So fewer dollars=less smell. Overall a good thing. I’d like them color and size coded as well, but if we can just get whatever smelly thing they put in the bills out that’d be a start.
Part of the lukewarm acceptance of the US dollar coin as well was that it’s still sized too similarly to the US quarter. (Apparently, there was resistance from the vending machine lobby to keep the dimensions of the coin from varying too far from the old Susan B. dimensions.) That, and when it was first introduced, it was marketed as a collectors item. Since there’d been no new $1 coins in quite a while, folks collected them as much as they used them, and it looked like “nobody” wanted to use the new coins.
I think clean fresh US money smells divine. Send all yours over here and I’ll take care of the stinkies for you.
(I agree that an older bill can pick up some stank. Send that over here too. I exist to serve.)
Thene, when I was living in the place with the dollar coin equivalents, I was using wallets made and sold in that country, marketed to residents. And I still had at least one day a month, on average, when I had too many coins to fit. And I’ve never had this issue with bills. Now, if the dollar coins could be made thinner, maybe the size of a US dime, this wouldn’t be much of an issue. But the Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea dollar coins in the US are not thin, nor were the coins I used.
@26: Aww…I’m touched! But I couldn’t ask such self-sacrifice from you. Fortunately, most transactions these days involve bits of plastic anyway, so it’s unnecessary.
Similarily anyone who doesn’t want pennies can send them to me
(hey, I one time collected $50 worth of pennies in a jar once. As an unemployed student that’s a big deal for me)
@29: Will you pay the shipping costs?
I’ll… just go return all my wallets and purses then, as clearly they should not have been sold to me in such patriotic condition?
Not actually trying to pick a fight over coins here (life is waaaaaaay too short for that), but come on.
Unless that was sarcastic.
And I still had at least one day a month, on average, when I had too many coins to fit. And I’ve never had this issue with bills.
Having too many coins has happened to me on rare occasion, but conversely, the first time I lived in the US I had a job waiting tables and I had to buy a new wallet almost immediately because the one I used in the UK would not fold shut around the piles of bills that I was accumulating. I guess this is partly a class thing – something that has the greatest effect on people who earn income mostly from tips rather than wages.
Thene, I worked for tips for a few years driving a cab and delivering pizzas. And I handled lots of cash as a grocery cashier (back in the day when there was no such things as either debit cards or laser scanners). When you handle cash such that you hand over some of the cash to the cashier and keep the rest for a tip, every so often you consolidate. You get a $2 tip on a $16 transaction. You already have $3 in singles on you. You keep the $5 bill from the $16 transaction and give the cashier the $10 bill and six $1’s – the two from the tip, the one from the transaction and the 3 that you had already.
It has been my experience – and the experience of every grocery cashier and cab driver I’ve talked to – that while women in the U.S. more often have and use wads of singles, men pretty much unanimously want the biggest bills they can change into. Women have purses and can just stuff bills into them. Men are going to sit on those bills in their wallets and so want as few bills as possible. If you’re a cashier and someone hands you a $50 or a $100 bill the odds are 19:1 that someone is a male.
I’ve been to Canada. I’ve got a few loonies and twonies. And I’ve got a fiver with a picture of Carol Burnett on it. Again – Americans can use dollar coins if they want to. They choose not to. Should the government force them? Or should it abide by the expressed will of the people, even though it costs money?
I have a jar on my dresser. Every day any change I have in my pockets goes into that jar. It takes about 6 to 8 weeks to fill the jar, which generally ends up to be about $60. I don’t want to carry change in my pocket. I don’t want the weight and I don’t want it tangling up with my keys and my cell phone. A small change purse would help with it jingling in my pocket but there would still be the weight and now I’ve got one more object in my pants pocket. Of course, that’s me. YMMV.
Kit, what they could do is get rid of the Kennedy 50-cent piece and make that the dimension for the dollar coin. I can’t think of the last time I saw a 50-cent piece used in a transaction.
Although when my brothers and I play poker the stakes generally involved a bunch of quarters in the pot. So sometimes I’ll go to the bank and get some 50-cent pieces, dollar coins and $2 bills. Then they run their mouths and we all drink some more whiskey and get loud.
Ron, is it not also “the expressed will of the people” that the government try to be frugal? Would not “the people” like a government that costs less?
Besides, where the hell is “the expressed will of the people”? Has anyone actually done a survey asking Americans straight-out, which would you like better, a government that spends less, or a government that provides you with dollar bills instead of dollar coins?
Yes, it is the expressed will of the people that the government be frugal. And it is the will of the people that they use money that costs more to use than an alternative. So, surprise; people can be inconsistent! Or, they can decide that while overall they’d rather be frugal, in this particular instance they figure it’s worth the cost. People make choices like that all the time. Over here they’ll drive that crappy car for another couple of years. Over there they’ll use the money they saved and buy a new hi-definition TV.
I don’t know if any such survey has ever been taken. I would certainly be interested in the result. But the will of the people is not merely expressed in a survey, or even the polling booth. It’s also expressed in their actions. In fact, isn’t what people choose to do a better expression of their will than in what they say? From antiquity we know that “Actions speak louder than words.” And their action has been to choose to use dollar bills instead of dollar coins.
Now, it might be fair to say that the case hasn’t been properly made to the people. How many people know that the country could save a half a billion dollars a year by switching to dollar coins? Maybe the choice that Americans are making is not an informed one. But in that case what should be done is to better inform people, not to legislate against their will.
Oh, $2 bills! I completely fell in love with them as a kid, for reasons I can’t comprehend. I miss them.
Thene, I can see that getting a lot of tip money, most of it in singles, is going to be a problem no matter where one is. When I have a too-many-bills problem, though, I clip some of them together with a paper clip and throw them in the bottom of my purse. That’s something I wouldn’t do with coins, by choice — too much chance of overlooking one and then losing it on some other occasion.
So very clearly, the solution is very thin dollar coins and a reissue of $2 bills.
I don’t use dollar coins because the only place I ever get them is when I’m in NY and I take Metro-North into the City and pay cash to the machine for my ticket. It gives me back one dollar coins and I’m always happy when I get them. They’re easier to use than bills – I don’t have to get my wallet out of my pocket & open my wallet to find them.
As to change in my pockets… If I have excess change it goes on top of my dresser for days when I’m short on change. I always try to have about a dollar in loose change with a minimum of 4 pennies. I haven’t had more than a couple of dollars of change on my dresser in years.
nm, if you miss $2 bills then go to the bank and get some. They are still printed and circulated. Every so often when I’m in the mood and I’m at my bank (so much is on-line now or done via ATM that I’m rarely in the bank) I get $20 or $40 worth and just spend them at various places.
Really? I was cashiering earlier this year and the bulk of the $100s I saw came from extremely old women. But it seems obvious on the face of it that the gender (and age, which majorly affects gendered behaviour) of people who hand you what kind of money is entirely dependent on what type of business you work for and who they market their products to. Any generalisations on that front are going to be heavily skewed by the gender aspects of American consumerism. You’re not telling me anything other than that you worked for a place that attracted a lot of men who preferred cash to plastic.
I have handled lots of cash in 3 jobs: grocery cashier, cab driver, and pizza delivery man. My customers were mostly women when I was grocery cashier. I don’t think there was a particular sex bias in the other two jobs. And women rarely ever gave me anything larger than a $20.
Back when I was a grocery cashier using plastic to buy your groceries was not an option. I’m not talking at that particular store. This was 1974. Grocery stores didn’t take credit cards, period. I worked a cab back then as well, and again there was no provision to take credit cards. I delivered pizzas when I was in graduate school in the ’80’s. No way to do cards then, either.
And if you used a credit card somewhere, you put it in a flat machine and put a 3-part (with carbon paper) receipt on it. Then you ran an inked roller back and forth on it. That made an impression on the receipts. You then signed the receipts. You got one of the carbon copies, and the others went in the cash drawer.
Damn. Now you make me think. To ring up the groceries I’d pick up or turn each item until I saw the price marking. Then I’d punch the numbers. There were columns of keys on the register. From top to bottom the left most was $100 – $900. The next column to the right was $10 – $90, and so forth. The numbers stayed down when you pushed them. So to ring up a huge turkey you’d push the $10 button, the $2 button, the 50-cent button and the 6-cent button. Then there was a LARGE button to the right, about 1″ by 3″ and curved to the contour of the register face. You’d whack that with the heel or outside edge of your right hand and an electric motor would pop the keys back up and display the amount via a mechanical (not electronic) display. Then you could grab the next article. At the end you’d hit a “Sub-Total” button and you’d see the total to that point. Each mechanical number had a small sticker on it that was the tax for that amount. You’d add them together and punch that in as “Tax” and then hit “Total”. There was no “Amount Tendered” button, BTW. I had to take a math test showing that I could calculate proper change for a $58.29 bill if someone handed me four twenties. If you flunked (you got to get one wrong out of 20 examples) you couldn’t have the job. While the test was pencil and paper, in practice you always did it in your head, and only used a pencil if the customer didn’t believe you had made their change right.
You were pounding your fingers a lot on that thing, and you had to be fast. And it now occurs to me that it would be real tough for someone left-handed.
RonF-
You are old.
RonF, I can get $2 bills at the bank? You have made me practically giddy with delight — I haven’t even seen one in longer than I can remember. I know what I’m doing on my lunch break today….
I am Swiss/American and spend about 6 months in the US each year. In Switzerland, the smallest bill you can get is a the equivalent of $10 ( maybe worth a little more than $10). We have rid of the pennies in Switzerland, a long time ago, and I’ll tell ya that nobody regrets that. Transactions are all end up even or with 5 instead.
The problem in the US isn’t just the penny but rather the utter ignorance of the surrounding world. As the US dollar devalues, it makes no sense whatsoever to still have denominations of $1, $2, or even $5 bills in relevance to the outside world and of course exchange rates. I remember when the dollar to swiss franc was 1.68 not too long ago. Now its stands at .97 swiss franc so it is worth less and less. Yet, the stubborn Americans insist on keeping dollar bills which don’t buy you anything anymore.
If you go to the US Mint website you can order a $250 box of dollar coins for face value, shipping is free. If you agree with the premise of them post, I encourage you to do so.
If you go at the bank machine, you only get 20$ in increments, up to 500$ a day. For sure that’s lighter than coins. But it’s also few bills. I’d rather have 100 1$ dollar coins (accumulated over time, and left at home) I can roll and exchange for 20$ bills than having tons of 1$ bills in my wallet that I wouldn’t think of leaving at home.
“Oh and about money for the disabled – In Australia, all coins are shaped differently and come in different sizes and have different edging to help the blind find the right coins. All notes are of different sizes as well. ”
Same for Canada. Edgings vary, sizes vary. The values are usually very recognizeable. The only mistakes that could occur is the 1 cent for the 10 cents (thickness and edging are different, but the 1 cent is barely bigger).
We have 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, 50 cents (for collectors, not in circulation – but still valid cash), 1$, 2$.
Bills are color-coded. 5$ is blue, 10$ is yellowish, 20$ is green, 50$ is red, 100$ is brown. I never saw higher denominations, though 1000$ no doubt exists.
1$ and 2$ bills were removed and it’s discussed to remove the 1 cent coin and replacing the 5$ dollar bill for 5$ coins.
They removed the 1$ bill for the coin in 1986, the 2$ in 1996. I was born in 1982. So let’s say I’ve known the bills and seen them, but don’t miss them. I’ve also used both wallets pre-transition and purses now.
Wallets, well you take a wallet that has a change pocket spacious enough, it won’t get heavy. Though I always kept stuff in my front pockets, never my back pockets. I figured if someone was going to try to steal, the front was much safer, and men-cut jeans are large enough that it shouldn’t hurt you (keys will though).
Purse. Well my purse has 3 sections. A small one at the bottom, a middle-sized in the middle and a large one being the main thing. It’s a pretty small-sized purse compared to the huge one my mother uses. I’d say a capacity of about 3 liters, or almost a gallon, total.
I put bills and change in the smaller section and barely anything else, so I know where to look for money and find it fast. It’s also easier to find coins. I could stuff well over 100 1$ coins in that smaller section if I wanted to, though I probably won’t (no reason to).
If you ever buy food/snacks/drinks from machines, 1 and 2$ coins are MUCH easier to deal with than trying to enter a bill and having it be ‘spit’ out by the machine 10 times. I’d always keep 10$ worth of change (often all in 2$) to pay for snacks and drinks while at work, it wasn’t heavy or hard to find.
From the wiki about Canadian coins:
See, just do it, and people will adapt. I don’t think the population was ever consulted.
Sidenote: We also have a 1 million dollar coin lol. 1 in circulation, weights 220 lbs.
Robert: I prefer the term “experienced”.
nm: Pick up any $2’s yet?
Other Americans: Quick, no fair searching: who is on the obverse side and what is on the reverse side of the $2?
Schala: So, no one was consulted, the government just did what it wanted to without the populace having a voice? That’s not a feature, that’s a bug. And you don’t end up with tons of $1 in your wallet. Unless you’re doing business on the street you make change as you go. I rarely have more than five $1s in my pocket at any time. The rest is $5s, $10s and $20s.
Well, I knew the obverse and knew that I had no idea about the reverse.
That’s worth a dollar, right?
Well, the government probably figured that most people would like to keep their services, such as universal healthcare and free public education with low cost for post-secondary education. While reducing the debt and cutting on unnecessary costs like having 1 and 2$ paper bills. It’s an economic decision, not a popular decision.
As opposed to saying “Folks, we’ve put both $1 coins and $1 bills out there. If you use the coins we can save millions of dollars to put towards social services.” That way, instead of assuming what people want, you can actually let them choose themselves what they want. It’s called “freedom”, something a free people have, in a country where the government is a servant of the people rather than their master or their nanny.
I’ve gotta go with Schala on this and then go further. Elected representatives making a decision is not anything like the populace not having a voice. Elected representatives are elected for purposes like this. It is, indeed, a feature of Representative Democracy for stuff like this to happen.
Hm. First, how much of this change was put in place by the elected officials and how much of it was put in place by the un-elected bureaucracy? Second, elected officials are certainly necessary to make choices for us – but only when necessary. Here is a choice that the people can make for themselves freely. There’s no need for the elected officials to get invovled, and therefore they shouldn’t.
I want my elected officials to make decisions like that. I don’t want to be involved in the minutiae of day to day governing. I have other things to do with my time.
Elected officials. I don’t think the bureaucracy can decide such things, but maybe the Royal Canadian Mint (those who make all coins and bills for Canada, owned by the government) suggested it.
The people made their choice when they elected the people at the top. You elect Harper as prime minister? He takes decisions, even if he can be opposed by other parties (many more than 2 parties here) and his decisions protested by the population if unpopular.
And like Jake just said, most people don’t want to get involved in all decisions government officials take. If the government needed to consult the population on all decisions, the government would hardly take any, and thus, stagnate.
Big stuff like the secession of Quebec province are stuff you need popular vote for (in that province itself). Administrative quibbles are not.
My point is that the choice is already being made, by the public. If the elected officials stop the production of $1 and $2 bills and provide only coins instead, what they are doing is not so much making a choice that the public has left to them. What they are doing is countermanding the choice that the public has already made.
So…did someone vote to have 1$ and 2$ bills 200 years ago when those basically made you a new-rich? (What with having stuff for less than 1 cent each back then)
Canada also had 25 cents bills and I heard about the US having 1/2 cent coins in the past. I’m sure there’s more stuff that became outdated over time by the inflation and higher wages.
The guy who earned 1$ a day earned 1$ an hour 20 years later, and minimum wage in Canada is now about 9-10$ an hour. The scales have changed. What are now 20$ bills (extremely common) were very hard to come by 50 years ago. And will probably be loose change 50 years in the future. Unless we do like Brazil and devalue our cash by 1 million within 2 decades and simply change the name of the unit (cruzeiro -> new cruzeiro -> real).