The Two Dollar Project

1,367.01662 miles

A BBC article was sent to me by quite a few people.  Cole did it first, so he gets the credit.  Basically it says what I’ve been saying for a long time: the dollar coin does not work because it is not given as change at the store.  Almost all coinage in circulation gets into circulation in the form of change at the store.  If cashiers don’t give the coins as change, the bulk of the populace never see them.

The article also informs us that the government has a stockpile of 1.1 billion dollar coins.  Let us give a thought to how huge a number 1.1 billion is.  Put it this way, .1 billion is one hundred millions.  One hundred millions is less than one tenth of the number of dollar coins that are held in reserve by the United States.  Observe the nifty infobox I “borrowed” from them:

Notice anything strange about that box?  Does it raise any questions for you?  That’s right, we are all thinking the same thing: why New Mexico to Chicago?  Seriously?  There isn’t a more interesting distance that happens to be 1,367 miles?  That it is the same distance from Olympia, Washington to El Paso, Texas.  At least that is the distance between two cities.  1,367 miles is also the distance from Budapest to Cairo, Milan to St. Petersburg, Helsinki to Rome, Manila to Bangkok.  Not to mention that the Orange River is that long.  And that is just two pages of google results.  During the Han Dynasty, 1,367 miles of Great Wall were built.  Yet, the BBC (or the US Mint) thinks that the best illustration of the distance is New Mexico to Chicago.