Does anyone remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin?
And is anyone actually using those gold-tinted Sacagawea dollar coins? Or those presidential or Native American coins that replaced them and are still being minted?
Despite that, a first-term Arizona congressman Republican thinks he can convince Americans to do what prior efforts have not: scrap their dollar bills in favor of coins. And he is undeterred that none of the prior efforts have gained widespread public support.
David Schweikert told Capitol Media Services he's got two things working in his favor.
One is the mounting deficit.
"There's this hunger out there for ways to save money," he said.
It does cost more to mint a coin than print a dollar bill. But Schweikert said that the wear and tear on dollars means that within just one year, three out of every four have to be taken out of circulation.
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"A coin has about a 30-year life," he said.
Schweikert put the annual savings at $184 million. Multiply that out over just the first decade, he said, ``it starts being real money.''
The other, he conceded, will be to force the issue - and not make the same mistake as another former member of the state's congressional delegation.
It was Rep. Jim Kolbe who in 1997 pushed through a measure to replace the wildly unpopular Susan B. Anthony dollar with what became the Sacagawea coin.
But as Kolbe conceded, the bill he was able to get through Congress had a shortcoming: It allowed the government to keep printing those dollars bills. And as long as greenbacks remain available, the public has shown little interest in replacing them with more coins jingling in their pockets.
Schweikert said he does not intend to make the same mistake. His legislation would require federal reserve banks to stop issuing dollar bills when the circulation of dollar coins exceeds 600 million a year - but no later than four years after the measure becomes law.
Still, he contends that it will not be necessary to wrest dollar bills from the hands, wallets and purses of Americans. He said the experience elsewhere proves that people will accept coins over small-denomination bills.
The five euro bill is the smallest paper money among countries that use it, with one- and two-euro coins.
And Canada replaced its one dollar bill with a coin commonly called a "loonie" because of the waterfowl image it carries.
He acknowledged that there some "obvious parochialism" behind his proposal. Any dollar coin would have at least some copper.
"It's good for Arizona," he said.
