The American loonie out of tuney

WASHINGTON -- The plight of the American loonie is so desperate that Abraham Lincoln has been promoted from the penny to save it.

You could do a lot of shopping in this country without knowing that the United States even has an imitation gold-coloured one-dollar coin -- most people here have no idea that it exists -- but the fact is that half a billion of them are stamped out every year, and almost none of them ever is spent in commerce, except by me.

Or, as one sheepish official of the Treasury Department recently obfuscated to Congress, "transactional demand for one-dollar coins has not increased materially."

Currently, the orphan disc is featuring the presidents of the United States in chronological order, four different dead men per annum, plus an additional issue honouring native Americans.

The Indian dollar depicts Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition from the prairies to the Pacific in 1804. She's on the obverse, with her baby son, Jean Baptiste, fast asleep on her back. Nobody uses that coin, either.

The presidential series began in 2007 with George Washington, followed by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. When George's metal dollar came out, the U.S. Mint tried an advertising campaign with the slogan, "It's SO money." It was ignored.

When it was Tom's turn a few months later, the mint held a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial and asked people to name the first four presidents in order. Ninety-three per cent got it wrong.

In 2010, we kicked off with three of the least illustrious chief executives in history, men who saw civil war mustering on the horizon in the 1840s and '50s and did nothing to prevent it: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

The latter's tenure was neatly summarized on its final morning when he said to his successor, "If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed."

The successor was Abraham Lincoln, whose presidential coin was issued on Nov. 18, 2010, and has not been seen in public since. Defeating the Confederacy was easy work compared to getting Americans to accept a new kind of cash.

In downtown Washington, the mint maintains a small retail outlet. I go there every time a new presidential dollar is emitted, not to mention the new series of "America The Beautiful" 25-cent pieces that will highlight a national park or scenic landmark in each of the 50 states before it peters out in 2021.

Behind the counter on my last sojourn was a pleasant man named Matthew Mangold, which I am not making up.

Mangold also despaired of the dollar coin's abject failure, moaning that "There was someone in here recently who didn't know a nickel from a quarter, and he laughed about it. I'm talking about a second-year college student!

"Americans don't know what's in their own pockets!" Mangold fulminated. "How are you going to teach them to save money if you don't have coins?"

I noted that my wife never carries any currency, yet somehow she manages to spend a king's ransom every week. And I argued that maybe Millard Fillmore doesn't really deserve to be in our pants.

"You've got to have cash in your pocket," Matthew Mangold gasped. "The system could break down!"

"If the system breaks down," I said, "Franklin Pierce ain't gonna save us."

The presidential and Sacagawea dollars are not the first U.S. coins to flop. A two-cent piece, a three-cent piece and a 25-cent piece were tried and abandoned long ago. Fifty-cent pieces are minted for collectors every year but no longer are put into circulation, even though they bear the image of the late, beloved John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (JFK will get his dollar coin in 2015.)

The culprit here, of course, is the American government's refusal to stop printing the one-dollar bill, which Canada did in 1989, two years after the introduction of the loonie. In fact, the only time there has been a run on the new "golden" U.S. dollar came when a number of sharpies realized they could buy them in bulk, at face value, by mail-order from the mint (free shipping!), charge the transaction to their reward-based credit card, lug the coins to the nearest bank, trade them for paper money and keep the airline miles.

At the retail outlet of the U.S. Mint, I noted to Matthew Mangold that it was a pretty clever scam while it lasted, which wasn't quite long enough for me to get a free flight to Paris.

The clerk nodded silently, pointed toward the elevator, and said, "Somebody on the fifth floor sure put a stop to THAT."

Allen Abel is a Brooklyn-born Canadian journalist based in Washington, D.C.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 22, 2011 H11