THAT PAPER MONEY FAD CAN'T END FAST ENOUGH:

Scrap the Greenback!: It's time to get rid of the dollar bill (Christopher Bonanos, March 15, 2007, Slate)

So the United States is introducing dollar coins, again. Earlier this month, the Treasury put George Washington's face on a golden coin, the first in a limited run that will eventually include every American president through Ronald Reagan and possibly beyond. (Only presidents who have been dead two years will be depicted, so if George H.W. Bush is still healthy when his turn arrives, the series will end with the Gipper.) This is the government's fourth attempt to move American spenders from dollar bills to dollar coins, after three flops that satisfied nobody but coin collectors. But these quite sensible efforts are destined to fail unless the Treasury finally does what it should have done long ago: Stop printing dollar bills.

There's no reason the United States shouldn't be using dollar coins right now. Canadian and Australian dollars are made of metal. So are the British pound sterling and the euro. That's because coins are vastly more durable than paper money. Though a coin costs about three times as much to produce as a bill, it will circulate for an average of 30 years, whereas a dollar bill lasts 22 months, and for the last few of those, has all the charm of a grimy, germy handkerchief. The United States General Accounting Office says we'll save $500 million a year in production costs if we shift to coins; another GAO document puts the savings even higher, at $747.5 million.

Of course, coins won't be around in a few years either.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 16, 2007 12:00 AM