"Why spend more money on dies and design, etc...?"
If you had read the article you would know that when they make coins people don't spend they make money. With the state quarters many people hoard a certain amount of them as collectables. Since it cost about a nickel to make the quarter the gov't makes about 20 cents for every quarter kept out of circulation. It's estimated the government has made about 5 billion on the quarters so far. Imagine how much they would be raking in on the dollars (one planned for each US president)
Cool...let's replace the income from SS privitization accounts with money made on Presidential coins...then let's do baseball players (non steroid users of course) and the football players...(I didn't read the article...but I always do normally)