Judge Rules Paper Money Unfair to Blind

Wow - This sounds like a CR4 Challenge question. I wonder if coins will finally be used in the US for larger denominations

How much will this cost us? In other words - is it more expensive to produce coins than paper money? Inevitably, we, the citizens, will make up the difference -

Actually, funnily enough the materials in a penny are actually worth 1.7 cents (I don't think this even includes the cost of actually making the penny). In other words a penny is worth more than a penny.

"One way of expressing the savings is to compare the average yearly cost to the government of meeting the public's need for a dollar of coin or currency over the expected 30-year life of a coin. If the government meets that need by furnishing a note, it will have to produce 20 one-dollar notes over the 30-year period to replace continuously those that wear out hi order to keep a single one-dollar note in circulation. Thus, the average annual production cost for notes is about 2.5 cents (3.8 cents divided by 1.5 years) per dollar in circulation. By contrast, if the government meets the public's need for one-dollar currency through coins, the average annual production cost is only 0.27 cents (8 cents divided by 30 years) for each dollar in circulation. In addition, the more frequent and higher processing cost of notes adds to the cost of keeping a dollar note in circulation. Therefore, the government saves between 2 cents and 3 cents per year for each dollar coin that replaces a dollar note. That would add up to a savings of $120 million to $180 million a year if $6 billion in notes were replaced by an equal amount in coins. "

Seems to be a good summary

http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5499&sequence=0

I believe the Australian treasury did the calculations about the low denomination notes as well over a decade ago as we ditched them and now use $1 and $2 gold coins. I believe they are pretty much the same nickel alloy as the silver coins that everybody else uses except they have some other metal added to give them the colour. They look like this but unlike copper coins they don't change colour with age.

We also ditched the 1¢ and 2¢ coins at the same time so the smallest denomination now available is 5¢

I doubt coins will be used. The amount of precious metal needed to produce $50 and $100 coinage would be staggering. Paper money (in the US) is no longer tied to a gold reserve (it hasn't been since 1971), so there would be a huge resource cost to implement coinage.

I'm curious as to the thoughts of others as to how the US Treasury Department will revise paper money to make its use more accessible. Obvious ideas are:

1. Different size bills for different denominations.
2. Use different grades of paper that feel different tactilely.
3. Embed Braile characters into the money in a way that would not wear off due to daily abuse.

1971 was when Nixon essentially killed the Bretton Woods agreement and ended the gold standard de jure. As I understand it, as far as ordinary citizens were concerned the US had been pretty much de facto off the gold standard since 1933.

No need to make coins from precious metal - just as coins today aren't "worth" their face value in material I'd expect a possible new coin to be made of zinc and plated to keep costs down.

Oh c'mon...surely there are some composite/ceramics/intermetallics engineers out there who can come up with some cheap, durable and hard-to-fake currency.

Now's your chance to make money off politics! It's the new American Way!

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Dumb and dumber! Where will it all end? Radio is unfair for the deaf. The world is unfair to everyone to some degree. Will our courts ever let people be self reliant?

Now we just need a federal judge to rule that paper money is unfair to everyone except large private banks and government contractors.

The total expense involved for the private sector if we change the sizes of different denominations of our currency is HUGE! Think of how many ATMs, vending machines, cash register draws etc will be affected.

And yet .... many countries use different size notes for their currency based on denomination. Generally the larger the denomination, the larger the note.

Having been exposed to this over 30 years ago, I thought it made sense and wondered why we hadn't done it. I'm not vision impaired, yet it would make things easier in some ways.

However, this is all becoming a tempest in a teapot because we are steadily moving towards the use of plastic for smaller and smaller transactions.

Before the advent of credit and debit cards, and the rapid processing of them I think there would have been a much better justification to change the currency... but then that would also have been before the law was passed that the judge based his ruling on.

Bottom line for me: Other than changing the physical size, it would seem there is no other way that couldn't easily be foiled by a crook ... of course it would only fool a blind person, but then that would still defeat the purpose of making the change in the first place. Since that would entail so much expense and inconvenience, and since we have plastic cards, I am opposed to any change at this late date.

Anybody that has been to Australia will have noticed that we did away with paper money over a decade ago. Yes we use plastic money, no not the credit chard type, the money itself is printed on a polymer film rather than paper or cotton as in the US. There are several safety features that have been incorporated into the plastic money like micro printing that is considerably smaller that the micro printing on paper. Another is a see through windows that contains an image that is formed by separate components on each side of the note. This renders any photo reproduction process like colour photocopiers useless as it reproduces the entire image on both sides.. Also the size of Australian notes has been scaled to the denomination since we converted to decimal currency in 1966. The scaled size not only enables bind people to tell the denomination but also stops forgers from bleaching lower denomination notes, then reprinting them with higher denominations.

Polymer bank notes also last something like10 times as long as the paper equivalent making them considerably cheaper in the long run. Also they are extremely difficult to forge and as far a I know to date nobody has ever successful forged an Australian polymer bank note. Here is what an Australian $100 note looks like.

I just had a look and found that there are now over 20 countries using the polymer notes so it's defiantly the way to go. If you wish to see what they look like here is a link to a site that has examples of them from all the countries currently using them.

http://www.polymernotes.org/country_pages/aus.htm

Mind you since the US has still not embraced the metric system I won't be holding my breath

Most of the US engineering community does use metric to be globally compatible but yes, alot of the average Americans do not embrace the change.

You can't make me drive 88.51 KPH ....

We're more like 112.65 on most interstates now.

But you get there faster if you do 90K/Hr and 120K/Hr.

I do sometimes.

And sometimes I get a ticket;/

Ah but if the US used the metric system you wouldn't get a ticket.

miles, kilos, knots, mach .. its all the same in a relitive way

Now that is something the Dept. of Treasury and U S Mint need to look into. Solves several problems at once.

Next is the problem of getting the bloated bureaucracy to accept something new and different. Time to get off the dime!

Some years back I worked in a government building where they had spent an enormous amount of money having the now common lift buttons specially made with brail on them. The idea was that blind people could tell which floor they were pressing the button for. The only problem was that back then they didn't have the verbal annunciation systems that are now common to indicate on which floor the lift stopped. The result was that blind passengers needed somebody with them to say when to get out of the lift when it stopped on the floor they had pressed the button for.

I believe these are suppose to be mounted on the door jam for each floor. So a blind person can reach out of the elevator to verify the floor.

So in reality you need to get out of the lift to feel what floor it stopped on then when the lift takes off without you then you start all over again.

Nope just reach out

Fancy hotel. Gold and marble.

Only best for CR4

I think this image is funny for two reasons:

One is that the "G" is clearly already raised itself, the braille is kinda redundant.

The other is that the braille clearly says something more complex than "G." So "G" suffices for seeing people, but the blind need something that says "Ground Floor"?

Wow....(There's my response to that statement)

I don't get it.

The brail says

grkd floor

But I assume the actually meant

grnd floor

But they have stuffed up and mixed the symbols for the N and D. Here is a translation table

http://www.nbp.org/alphcard.pdf

Check it out yourself! Good one eh?

This is a pretty scary ruling. It obviously has a far greater impact potential than just paper money. Extending the logic, all transactions documented by a paper receipt would similarly fail the "meaningful access" definition.

That's actually incredibly insightful if you ask me. This ruling, in essence, is that money is "unfair" to blind people because some unscrupulous person can trick a blind person into thinking a $1 bill is a $20 bill or vice versa. However, this is kind of too little, too late since we are moving more and more towards "electronic" money every day, which is documented by reciepts. So with a paper money transaction an immoral person can probably only realistically rip a blind person off for $99, maybe a bit more depending on how many bills are changing hands, but with a debit card transaction there is pretty much no limit to how much they can steal (ie. charge $5000 for a $5 transaction).

Here is my $0.02 (which I guess is really worth $0.034!):

Pennies were going to be phased out, but the lobbyists for the zinc industry kept them in production - we switched from copper to zinc with some plating to make it look like a penny, and in the process it now costs more to make than the value of the coin itself. Why not just have a nickel or a dime and round off the change - they have been doing it that way in Europe for many years and (some would argue) the world hasn't ended yet.

As for paper being unfair for the visually challenged, I agree. But life is unfair if you are challenged and all of my efforts are not likely to change that. I'd rather feed the hungry in my community than make sure the blind can pay with cash.

It would be worth it just to see the confused look on teenagers twenty years from now when we say "here is my $0.02"

Haha, clever.

Prudence is absent in this jurisprudence.