Using coins for economic expansion?

[TreasonousBastard]

http://theweek.com/article/index/260610/a-radical-proposal-to-make-coins-useful-again

A radical proposal to make coins useful again


ike most people these days, I've got a jar on my desk at home with something like 20 bucks in change in it. I'd very much like to have that money, of course, but it's just too much of a hassle to go through it very often. So it just sits there, accumulating my daily coin harvest, until it gets so heavy it threatens to collapse my desk. Then I go through it and enjoy a nice windfall of a few months' pocket change. That's U.S. coin policy: A very inefficient and metal-intensive beer money program.

However, this week I got to thinking: When I lived in South Africa, I used to carry around change all the time. I didn't have the visceral reaction to paying in cash that I do here. Why is that? Two reasons, I suspect. First, South Africa has a value-added tax which is included in the total price, so you didn't usually get weird totals like 3.47 that we do with our obnoxious sales tax. But more importantly, in South Africa coins were worth something.

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Here's my solution: multiply the face value of every U.S. coin by 10. A penny will be worth 10 cents, a nickel 50 cents, a dime one dollar, a quarter $2.50, and a dollar coin 10 bucks. (We could also reinvent the half-dollar, which is barely produced now, as a nice $5 coin.)

This will have several beneficial effects: first, it will make change real money again. The whole point of having money is to facilitate the process of exchange, but studies have shown that people tend not to spend even the vaunted dollar coin. It's no surprise, given that we've been training people for decades to think of change as worthless. And multiplying by 10 sounds like a lot, but if anything, it isn't going far enough — the BLS inflation calculator only goes back to 1913, but even so, one dollar from that time was worth the equivalent of $23.87 today! The one-cent coin was the smallest then, and people still somehow survived. Rounding to the nearest tenth of a dollar in cash transactions today will be no problem.

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