The General Accountability (GAO) office has released a new statement on how much money the nation would save if we exclusively used dollar coins and terminated the paper dollar. At first the savings seem staggering: The GAO announced that we would save 5.5 billion dollars over the next thirty years.
I'm sure this is old hat to most of you, but we've had a dollar coin (on and off) since 1794). Sadly, dollar coins have never been popular with Americans. As a numismatist, I hate to admit it, but Americans love paper. I have documented this on my cynical history of the US dollar.
The big deception is the quoted savings is over a period of 30 years. The savings is, therefore 180 million dollars per year. With a population of approximately 300 million people, this means that each US citizen will save approximately 60 cents per year if we make the paper dollar bill defunct. Compared to other government expenditures, this savings is negligible. Sorry, GAO, I'm not buying your argument.
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