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?
A speech given in a ratifying convention is a weaker indication of original meaning of a Constitutional provision than debates in the Constitutional Convention, and understanding of the common interpretation of the plain words.
P.S
Sissy
Feel free to take a side....
Yeah feel free to condone personal attacks that have gone on throughout this thread by both sides.
I guess that’s what the smokey backroom is really for, I guess....
scoreboard.
Besides, not a one of you could hold any of the jocks of Lee, Davis, Forrest or any of the rest of them.
I’m certain they all (well except Forrest since he was nothing but a rabblerouser anyway) would be embarrassed by your actions within these threads.
They KNEW they had lost the war. It seems that the harder-headed need another lesson. OR something.
Man, you gotta take it easy Mike, you're making Neo-Yankees look all sensitive and stuff...Remember we are just a bunch of lunatics rebels and out of our minds, clinging to our Articles of Confederation; how can that get to ya?
Believe me, I have been slandered seven ways to Sunday on FR and HAVE NEVER PINGED AN ADMIN MODERATOR for my own behalf.
I didn’t for my behalf.
I did it because this thread and ones just like it happen every single day here.
It’s crap. It’s garbage. And it paints us all as fractured idiots instead of Conservatives focused on the goal of returning this country to something other than a socialist hellhole that it’s becoming.
Mike, no matter what happens in November there are anti-American collective elements, concentrated mostly in the North, that actually were stupid enough to vote for the Hopey Usurper in Chief. This is fact, not paranoia. Nothing is going to change them, not this election or the next 15.
There is a geographical component to our woes whether you except it or not. If I have to live in a smaller FREE REPUBLIC one day so be it. Surly the whole country cannot be saved, it's too late. We Southerners know things and see things differently. You see things as "help save us", and we see things as "get the hell away from me".
You’ll never live in anything except a self-deluded pipe dream because you haven’t got the stones to cash the check your mouth writes.
Now, go ahead and regale us with grandiose tales of how the glorious “south shall rise again”. Er, maybe right after the dukes of hazard rerun is over...
Not by non-uniformed combatants, unless you're willing to suffer the consequences.
Is that Latin?
Yep, I was thinking the same thing.
I especially recommend the Kent Masterson Brown book. It goes into more detail on what Lee’s campaign was really about. And how he deliberately left wounded behind rather than dump any of the supplies his army had seized prior to Gettysburg.
You Southron types are fond of dragging out quotes from "Gangs of New York" or "Outlaw Josey Wales" so I won't feel bad about offering a quote from that marvelous Australian movie "Breaker Morant". The scene is the court room where Major Thomas is cross-examining the first witness. The witness is talking about how he had to discipline one of the defendants for putting prisoners in open carriages in front of trains:
Major Thomas: Tell me, Mr. Robertson what was Lt Hancock's reason for putting Boer prisoners on open cattle cars on the trains.
Capt. Robertson: Well the Boers had been mining the lines and blowing up a lot of trains. He thought it might stop them.
Major Thomas: Well did it?
So the question really isn't so much whether Sherman shot guerrillas or whether they were in uniform. It's whether the attacks on the trains stopped. Did they?
I think that’s Southron for “G’night, mother.”
Yea, that’s it ;-)
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