The Chuck Norris Dollar

Washington DC is probably the only city in America that has advertisements on billboards battling out whether or not to scrap $1 bills in favor of $1 coins. I’m on the coin side of things.

You may recall that we tried out dollar coins a few years back. We tested out Susan B. Anthony dollars, then tried again with gold-colored Sacajaweas. Neither of them ever really caught on, and I suspect it’s because both featured respectable women who never resorted to killing people in order to solve problems. Recently we’ve started making coins with presidents on them, but I have mixed feelings about Millard Fillmore and Rutherford B. Hayes signaling a watershed event in American denomination preferences.

That’s why I came up with the Chuck Norris dollar:

It’s only a rough draft; we’ll probably need to hire a professional Chuck Norris engraver to make the final proof. I’m not sure what we’ll put on the back, but I do know it will glow in the dark. Maybe an eagle attacking a radioactive bear (if we put radium in the eagle’s and bear’s eyes then they will glow in the dark).

Anyway, you get the idea. And if you don’t like the idea, you’re probably a bed wetting communist. Let’s skip my awesome Chuck Norris proposal for a moment and explore the other benefits coins have over bills and notes.

It’s hard to screw up a vending machine with coins. How many times have you stood in front of a vending machine angrily feeding in a wadded bill, insisting to an uncaring sensor that it should spit out a Snickers or handgun? After a few minutes you either find someone with quarters or you kick in the glass and take everything. If we had dollar coins, you would probably just use those instead. And those used dollars and non-kicked-in vending machine windows add up.

The biggest thing for me is that coins make you feel wealthy. In the UK they have thick pound coins instead of £1 notes. When you squeeze a couple between your fingers you can’t help feeling prosperous, even if they’re your last two. Maybe we’ve had coins long enough that some deep part of our lymbic system knows what they mean. But I don’t get the same giddy thrill from holding a $1 bill.

Bills simply don’t have the same “medieval land baron” sensation that coins have. Have you ever thrown thirty or forty dollars on top of your bed and rolled around in them? You feel like a gigolo. You may like that kind of shenanigan, but I have a masters degree. Conversely, get twenty £1 coins in a small bag and feel the weight of it. Doesn’t that seem more substantial? It’s like your cupping Wealth’s scrotum.

If we switched to dollar coins we would be wealthier, because they take longer to wear out, so we spend less on minting them than bills. The Government Accountability Office has recommended that we switch to $1 coins for years. If we did it now, we’d save $146 million next year, and a total of $4.4 billion over thirty years.

Another big selling point for coins is that you can use them to make important life decisions. If you try to flip a $1 bill, the wind catches it and you chase it across the railroad tracks like a moron. Sometimes they just crumple up or land on their side. Conversely, a sturdy ‘ol Chuck Norris dollar can be flipped over a billion times and still land on heads or tails.

What about blind people? We don’t put braille on dollar bills. I’ve never lied about a bill’s value to a blind person before, but I’ve certainly considered it. There are worse people than me all over the place, waiting to take advantage of the visually impaired. Dollar coins are an easy fix.

And, which is more fun to throw off the tops of buildings?