Posted on 08/21/2010 7:17:45 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Today, the U.S. Treasury released a $1 coin commemorating former President James Buchanan. And people aren't happy about it.
To understand why, some background is helpful. In 2007, thanks to a bill promoted by then-Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, the Treasury began minting $1 coins with the likenesses of former Presidents, starting with George Washington.
The coins -- which have been appearing ever since, featuring a new President every three months -- are meant to improve use and circulation of America's dollar coins, which are often seen as an awkward misfit among currency, neither fish nor fowl.
Sununu's initiative drew inspiration from the 50 State Quarters Program, which launched in 1999. The runaway success of that effort, according to his legislation, "shows that a design on a U.S. circulating coin that is regularly changed... radically increases demand for the coin, rapidly pulling it through the economy."
The bill also suggested that a program wherein Presidents are featured on a succession of $1 coins, and First Spouses commemorated on gold $10 coins, could help correct a state of affairs where "many people cannot name all of the Presidents, and fewer can name the spouses, nor can many people accurately place each President in the proper time period of American history."
So the bill passed, and the Washington dollar coin appeared not long after. It was followed by Adams, Jefferson, et al., with the First Spouse coins minted alongside.
Now we're up to Buchanan, the fifteenth President, who took office in 1857 and turned things over to Abraham Lincoln in 1861, and whose coin (produced at the Philadelphia and Denver Mints and purchasable through the U.S. Mint website) has occasioned the aforementioned grousing. Here's where some feel the coin program is falling short:
1. The coins aren't circulating.
Many Americans have never gotten into the habit of using $1 coins, and as a result, over a billion commemorative Presidential coins are sitting around in a stockpile at the Federal Reserve. As BBC News reports, if these coins were stacked up and laid on their side, they'd stretch for 1,367 miles, or the distance from Chicago to New Mexico.
2. They don't seem to be educating people, either.
In February 2008, a year after the first presidential coins were minted, The New York Times reported that a survey had found large numbers of American teens to be woefully ignorant of their country's history. It was far from the first time Americans had gotten a dismal grade in history, suggesting that Sununu's commemorative-coin campaign isn't having much of an effect in that arena, either.
3. James Buchanan was kind of a crappy president.
In fairness, this is a grievance with a specific president, not the presidential coins program as a whole. Still, it seems to come up in all the coverage of the new coin: Buchanan wasn't very good at his job.
That's the consensus of historians, anyway, who have traditionally censured Buchanan for his failure to prevent the Civil War. Last year, a C-SPAN survey of historians granted Buchanan the dubious distinction of worst president ever.
Still, all of this isn't reason enough to declare the commemorative-coins program a total failure. If more coin collectors start avidly pursuing the presidential coins, it could have the effect of pushing down the national debt, thanks to the way the value of the coins fluctuates with their availability. And if the dollar coins were to catch on and replace paper $1 bills entirely, it could save the country between $500 and $700 million each year in printing costs.
Plus, if things stay on track, 2012 will see the release of the Chester A. Arthur dollar coin -- marking the first time that long non-commemorated president's face has ever appeared on any nation's currency. And who are we to deprive him of that?
I wouldn't call this 'associating'. I consider you as much an enemy as any other libtard.
Maybe you should secede from FR.
What? And leave you revisionist buffoons alone to post your bilge unchallenged? Not happening, moron.
The only difference between the plantations and the northern mills was the, so called, 'free' vs slave labor. If you worked in the mill, you most likely lived in any one of the infamous 'mill hills' in a house owned by the mill, shopped at the mill store, went to the mill doctor, etc. and you either worked until the day you died or until your brain was so rattled and body so wracked that you were no longer useful to the mill and you were simply put out. Discipline was enforced by the constant threat of losing ones job. That system was nothing more than a mean spirited communist dictatorship designed to wring every last penny of profit without regard to the humans that it laid waste to. It was also the system that spawned the labor unions.
That is the great yankee way so don't lecture me about 'self serving'.
Big government on thee but not on me is not conservatism at all.
You lost me there. When have you ever heard me or any of the other Rebs advocate 'big government'? I suggest that all that you've heard from us it just the opposite.
Question: Was the owner of the mill productive?
Damn, colonel, I gave you more credit than that. I guess you've taken too many coven pills and you've completed the metamorphosis.
If you truly are from the South and not just some stinking transplant how can you even go there?
Likewise I’m sure Madam...
Who?
I can imagine what a reb message board in December 1860 would have been like. A lot of talk, a lot of threats and a lot of predictions on a reb win. 1860 message board particiants like CowboyAshley and ScarlettSunshine would have posted admirable denigrations of Lincoln and Yankees just as their descendants do today. But I bet there would not have been much mention about black Confederates.
The Yankee labor market in 1860 wasn't all we might wish, but it was infinitely better than a system where the "master" might sell your wife across the state.
Government doesn't get any bigger than slavery. That is, if you are the slave.
There were a few Yankees that behaved badly. Criminal fringes are inevitable with any army, including the Confederates. But as to policy, Sherman did nothing a Confederate general wouldn’t have done to the opposing home front had doing so been in their interest to win. The rebs’ fondest hope was that they might induce a European army to overrun their Northern countrymen. To me, it doesn’t get any lower than that. George Washington would have been horrified and disgusted by the Confederates’ strategy.
Nobody that understands history of the USA-CSA conflict would make that statement. This is the type of stupid malicious lie that perpetuates these threads, you are either stupid or have an anti-South agenda.
As far as CSA PACS went; It is well documented that it was the policy NOT to harm Northern civilians and their property, did it happen yes. Not very often but yes.
For the USA it was the policy to wreck the Southern civilian population. It is well documented.
The yankee cotton mills that depended on the Southern cotton would disagree with that.
I think we're done here. Your refusal to acknowledge facts makes this debate impossible to continue.
Free Dixie!
In reality it was every yankee that sided with Lincoln that behaved badly.
Criminal fringes are inevitable with any army, including the Confederates.
Typical liberal response. Acceptance through equivalency.
Sherman did nothing a Confederate general wouldn’t have done to the opposing home front had doing so been in their interest to win.
I'm throwing the BS flag on that one. Lee, Jackson or any other Confederate general would not have behaved as poorly as Sherman, Sheridan and many other yankee officers.
The rebs’ fondest hope was that they might induce a European army to overrun their Northern countrymen. To me, it doesn’t get any lower than that.
So you're suggesting that securing allies is ignoble?
Trying for the Baghdad Bob Award or the Sergeant Schultz Medal? From Union Captain George Whitfield Pepper's 1866 book, "Personal Recollections of Sherman's Campaigns: In Georgia and the Carolina's":
There are hundreds of these mounted men with the column, and they go everywhere. I hazard nothing in saying that three-fifths (in value) of the personal property of the country we passed through was taken.
The few guys you speak of must have had a heck of a time carrying away that much stolen loot.
From page 90 of the book, "A City Laid Waste, The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia," that presents William Gilmore Simms' account of the treatment of Columbia, South Carolina by Federal troops:
We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced on women dwelling in the suburbs. Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered -- one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. ... Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women [rb: black women in this case] to the torture of their embraces ...
Well, those must have been those famous three-man Union regiments.
I don’t know. At least those people DID SOMETHING about it.
I think the Confederate ancestors of the people here today would be ashamed that for all the big words and idle threats, these people today won’t do anything about it.
Obama is the worst president ever.
Documented where?
The Yankee cotton mills would have been more profitable had the non-productive slaveowners not gotten in the way of free labor and free markets. Surely you don't really think slave labor is more productive than free labor working for their own self interest You are trying so hard to defend the indefensible that I'm afraid you sound like a communist.
I would take accounts like that with a grain of salt. It is in the interest of a devastated and humiliated people with a questionable cause to cast the victor in the worst light possible.
I used to think Carter had a record nobody could approach, but daily Obama is making more of a case to supplant the Georgian.
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