There’s a lot of chatter out there that the debt reduction “super committee” isn’t getting the results it should be, especially with the clock running out on their time to cut the requisite $1.5 trillion from the budget. However, I think we need to give credit where it’s due. The super committee has one truly Herculean accomplishment under its belt; it has managed to identify an issue that Americans of all political stripes – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents – all agree on.
The issue? It’s a proposal to ditch the dollar bill in favor of a new dollar coin being advanced by a pair of Congressmen from copper-producing states. The bill purports to save the taxpayers an estimated $5.5 billion…over 30 years. Even those miniscule cost savings were thoroughly debunked in a recent USA Today op-ed, which states that “[t]he GAO report itself admits that factors outside the scope of financial benefit to the government were not considered, including the impact on private businesses and banks, and the costs of transferring, distributing, storing, authenticating and managing dollar coins.”
Just when it seemed like this proposed legislation couldn’t make any less sense, recent polling shows that voters are nearly united against the idea of replacing a bill with a coin. A survey performed by Lincoln Park Strategies for Americans for George found that:
•76 percent of Americans oppose doing away with the dollar bill, with that number representing a fairly equal share of Republicans, Democrats and Independents and voters from all regions of the country.
•45 percent of Americans believe that phasing out the dollar bill will have a net negative effect on the economy, versus just 10 percent who believe it will have a positive effect.
•75 percent of Americans view the dollar coin as both unwanted and unnecessary.
Congress so often comes up with these impractical measures whose overly complicated benefits are unlikely to come to fruition under the best of circumstances. The proposed switch to a dollar coin goes a step further by threatening to foist an extremely unpopular policy on the American people for cost savings that are dubious at best.
Anyone with common sense knows that the only path to meaningful deficit reduction is to make serious, sustained spending cuts that are guaranteed to save money. With a struggling economy and a government addicted to spending, haven’t we passed the point of smoke-and-mirrors tricks like this one?
Randy DeCleene previously served as Vice-President Cheney’s Deputy Press Secretary and as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Army. Currently, he is an SVP at k-global, a DC-based communications firm who represents the pro-dollar bill coalition Americans for George.
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