How come we do not use our 2 dollar bills or our one dollar coin?

[oscar]

Nah, the people who longed to put Reagan's face on a bill (and were surprised by the pushback to keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill -- they also targeted the dime, but that also went nowhere) would jump at the reintroduction of the $500 bill.

Martin Luther King, Jr. might also be in line, though maybe the $50 bill (bumping Grant, a historic figure but not really distinguished as a President) would work too. 

[The Nature Boy]

I think Grant is important enough as a Civil War figure to remain on the $50. Hamilton and Franklin set the precedent for non-Presidents on currency and you could argue that Grant would be worthy even if he had never been president.

[cpzilliacus]

I think Grant is important enough as a Civil War figure to remain on the $50. Hamilton and Franklin set the precedent for non-Presidents on currency and you could argue that Grant would be worthy even if he had never been president.

Only a few U.S. military officers outrank U.S. Grant in terms of national importance.  IMO they are (in alphabetical order):

Dwight D. Eisenhower
George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing
George Washington

[Scott5114]

If anyone should be bumped, it should be Andrew Jackson. Whatever successes he had (which, in my opinion pale in comparison to most of the others depicted on money) are overshadowed by his implementation of the Trail of Tears.

[kkt]

I think Grant is important enough as a Civil War figure to remain on the $50. Hamilton and Franklin set the precedent for non-Presidents on currency and you could argue that Grant would be worthy even if he had never been president.

Only a few U.S. military officers outrank U.S. Grant in terms of national importance.  IMO they are (in alphabetical order):

Dwight D. Eisenhower
George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing
George Washington

I would question the first three being more important than Grant.  Without Grant or Washington it's quite likely the Union would have split apart, or not existed.  In WW I and WW II there were other competent generals, who may not have been quite as good but would still have gotten the job done.

[oscar]

The coin counter we used when I worked in a retail store's accounting office used electrical resistance to count coins. The resistance value of the Susan B. Anthony "silver" dollar and that of the Sacajawea/president "gold" dollar is the same. The machine can't tell the difference between the two. Another result of this method is that all silver coins that came through the registers were rejected as "fake" because the resistance value of silver is different than the various alloys used.

I hope you were in charge of looking through the rejects.

[bugo]

If anyone should be bumped, it should be Andrew Jackson. Whatever successes he had (which, in my opinion pale in comparison to most of the others depicted on money) are overshadowed by his implementation of the Trail of Tears.

I agree. Living in Oklahoma and knowing many Native Americans, I care deeply about their plight despite having no Indian blood of my own. Andrew Jackson was a monster. Replace him with Teddy Roosevelt or Dwight D. Eisenhower.

[bugo]

I don't want to get rid of the penny and $1 bill. Most of the interesting coins I've found are pennies. I found 74 wheats in one $25 box, and I've also found a 1905 Indian head penny and a 1909 VDB penny in separate boxes. I don't want to get rid of the dollar bill because it's a real pain in the ass to stick my hand in my pocket (which I keep things besides change in) and dig through the change looking for coins. It's much handier to go through my wallet and grab 4 ones.

[bugo]

If you're going to add a high-denom note, skip the $200 and bring back the $500. As a casino cashier, I would find it immensely handy since $1200, the minimum jackpot amount, would go from 12 pieces to 4. Plus it would be fun seeing everyone wonder who the hell William McKinley is.

That's a lovely bill. American currency used to be so handsome...now it is ugly and looks like play money.

[Scott5114]

If anyone should be bumped, it should be Andrew Jackson. Whatever successes he had (which, in my opinion pale in comparison to most of the others depicted on money) are overshadowed by his implementation of the Trail of Tears.

I agree. Living in Oklahoma and knowing many Native Americans, I care deeply about their plight despite having no Indian blood of my own. Andrew Jackson was a monster. Replace him with Teddy Roosevelt or Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Theodore Roosevelt on a bill would be awesome. He would be appealing to both parties–he was a Republican, but he was a progressive that championed many causes that would be considered planks of the Democratic party platform today. And he had a very colorful personality. A lot of interesting selections were made for the Series I savings bonds, some of which I wouldn't mind seeing on money–Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einstein, for example. It might be nice to see someone who wasn't a politician or military leader on our money at some point.

I don't want to get rid of the penny and $1 bill. Most of the interesting coins I've found are pennies. I found 74 wheats in one $25 box, and I've also found a 1905 Indian head penny and a 1909 VDB penny in separate boxes. I don't want to get rid of the dollar bill because it's a real pain in the ass to stick my hand in my pocket (which I keep things besides change in) and dig through the change looking for coins. It's much handier to go through my wallet and grab 4 ones.

The nice thing about the $1 bill is that its design has remained static for so long that bills as old as 1963 can circulate virtually unnoticed. A 1969 $5 gets noticed because it stands out. $1s look the same.

I wouldn't mind switching to dollar coins because it would mean I'd have to deal with less ratty singles (they're not as bad as the $5s have gotten–the $5s circulating in OKC are beat to hell). The weight problem $1 coins present can be avoided by using $2s in conjunction with them–if you have an adequate supply of $2s you will only have one $1 coin on you at any time.

If you're going to add a high-denom note, skip the $200 and bring back the $500. As a casino cashier, I would find it immensely handy since $1200, the minimum jackpot amount, would go from 12 pieces to 4. Plus it would be fun seeing everyone wonder who the hell William McKinley is.
[$500 bill]

That's a lovely bill. American currency used to be so handsome...now it is ugly and looks like play money.

In my opinion, the highest denom ever issued for general use was also the nicest looking:


I love the arced "10,000"s in the upper corners, with the gradient. The artwork on this bill really makes it feel like the very big deal that it was. It just feels like something you could buy a car with (or, at the time that it was circulating, a house). Binion's casino in Vegas had a display of $1,000,000 worth of these up in the wall at one point.

The G-type design (the current, colorized design, so called because a "G" is used to denote them in BEP production reports) is a big step down from the old S-type designs we've been discussing. But the G-type is an improvement over the N-type (the white-background bills with the big portraits issued from 1996 to 2004), which are probably the ugliest currency the US has ever issued. Even the G-type has a few design atrocities in it, though, like the Big Purple Five Of Doom and the Even Bigger WordArt 100. I hate the way that the $100 broke convention with every other bill in its design generation by moving "ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS" to the top of the bill (that is not where the spelled out denomination goes, because it was the last phrase in the old guarantee "The United States of America Will Pay to the Bearer on Demand One Hundred Dollars") and shunting the signatures into one block down in the corner.

Make no mistake, though, the S-type had to die. There is no way to incorporate a watermark into the S-type design, and the watermark is an easy and nearly foolproof way to validate a bill. That doesn't mean that the N-type had to be ugly, though. Many currencies look much better than the dollar and still incorporate security features. I have one of these 10-mark bills, which were designed in 1989 and would have been a decent pattern for the dollar to follow:

[bugo]

Here are a couple of my favorite foreign bills. First is a Kazakh 2 tenge bill. It looks like it could have been designed by Alex Grey.




Here's another, the Zimbabwean $100 trillion bill. I like it for the sheer ridiculous of having such a high denomination bill.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

^^ I can top that with a 10^20 Hungarian Pengo bill .


Százmillió=A hundred millions, B. meant that it was multiplied by a trillion (billion in the long scale), thus making it a 100 quadrillion pengo bill.

Anyway, I find dollar bills (I've seen a few, actually) a bit bland with only green on them. I prefer euro notes (As they are called) with different colors for each value.

[vdeane]

Interesting thing about the euro... the bridges on the back were fictional.  Emphasis on were. http://www.designboom.com/design/fictional-bridges-on-euro-banknotes-realized-by-robin-stam/

IMO the backs high denomination US bills look like some casino/lotto jackpot ad.

The high denominations had William McKinley (500), Grover Cleveland (1000), James Madison (5000), Salmon Chase (10,000), and Woodrow Wilson (100,000), among many others in older versions of the bills. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_States_currency

[mrsman]

I like the idea of functioning our money on a 1-2-5 system.  It is almost logarithmic.

It's time to get rid of the penny.  Lincoln will be honored on the $5 bill.

The $1 bill should be eliminated in favor of the coin.  Washington will be honored on the quarter.

For the larger bills, here's who I'd honor:

$200  Theodore Roosevelt
$500  Woodrow Wilson (sorry William McKinley)
$1000 F.D.R   (sorry Grover Cleveland)
$2000 Eisenhower
$5000  Madison (was on the bill in the pre-Nixon era)
$10,000 Reagan  (sorry, Salmon Chase)

No bills larger than $10,000

[Pete from Boston]

This thread contains the first and second references to Salmon P. Chase I have ever encountered without his middle initial. 

I think it's clear (for reasons stated above) that the Treasury isn't interested in larger bills these days for the reasons mentioned above.  Very few licit transactions of thousands of dollars are conducted in cash. 

[1995hoo]

Interesting thing about the euro... the bridges on the back were fictional.  Emphasis on were. http://www.designboom.com/design/fictional-bridges-on-euro-banknotes-realized-by-robin-stam/

IMO the backs high denomination US bills look like some casino/lotto jackpot ad.

The high denominations had William McKinley (500), Grover Cleveland (1000), James Madison (5000), Salmon Chase (10,000), and Woodrow Wilson (100,000), among many others in older versions of the bills. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_States_currency

The $100,000 bill never circulated among the public. Note the unique wording: "One Hundred Thousand Dollars Payable to the Bearer on Demand as Authorized by Law." The other "demand notes" didn't include the "as Authorized by Law" portion. I believe I read somewhere it is a federal offense for a private citizen to be in possession of one. I've seen one a single time, years ago when we took the tour at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. They had one on display.

Funny thing, some people still don't know bills larger than $100 were withdrawn. A few years ago my parents took a trip to Uganda (a business trip for my dad, so my mother tagged along) and my father told my mother to get a $500 bill at the bank to pay for their safari. Of course she was unsuccessful and he got annoyed about it and was utterly flabbergasted when I told him that nowadays when a bank receives a bill larger than a $100 (which still happens once in a while) the feds require them to return it for destruction. (I had tried to get a $500 back in 1997 when I was moving out of the place I had lived for the summer and needed to give the landlord cash because I was closing my bank account. The bank manager told me about the requirement that they return them. I'd known bills larger than $100 were no longer in general circulation but had thought they might have had a few available. Didn't hurt to ask, I guess.)

I agree with the comments that it would be nice to have something larger than a $100 available because $100 doesn't go nearly as far as it did even 20 years ago. I don't agree with the comments about getting rid of the $50. I find the $50 convenient when I need to carry larger amounts of cash simply because carrying a stack of $20s makes your wallet too thick. Back when I worked downtown I often went to the Citibank ATM to pull out $400 or $500 when I needed cash because if I took that much, it dispensed most of it in $50s. Only ATMs I know of that ever gave something larger than a $20 (not counting ATMs in other countries with different valuation, of course, such as the 1,000-peso bills dispensed by Mexican ATMs).

[CNGL-Leudimin]

Interesting thing about the euro... the bridges on the back were fictional.  Emphasis on were. http://www.designboom.com/design/fictional-bridges-on-euro-banknotes-realized-by-robin-stam/

You said it right, were. I knew they were to build them somewhere in the Netherlands, and they are now in Google Street View: Looking from the €50 bridge towards the €10 one, if you turn around you will see the €500 bridge in the distance. This bridge is worth €25 , this is the €5 side with the €200 bridge in the distance, turning around you'll see the €20 side with the €100 bridge at the background.

Anyway, the original note designs included real bridges, but they were modified to a more generic representation.

[oscar]

I don't agree with the comments about getting rid of the $50. I find the $50 convenient when I need to carry larger amounts of cash simply because carrying a stack of $20s makes your wallet too thick. Back when I worked downtown I often went to the Citibank ATM to pull out $400 or $500 when I needed cash because if I took that much, it dispensed most of it in $50s. Only ATMs I know of that ever gave something larger than a $20 (not counting ATMs in other countries with different valuation, of course, such as the 1,000-peso bills dispensed by Mexican ATMs).

I also find the $50 bills somewhat useful, when I'm traveling outside my regional bank's largely Southern service area, and need to carry more cash than usual without bulking up my wallet so I can avoid out-of-network ATM fees.  I've not had much trouble spending $50s when needed, though I try to spend them in big-bill-friendly places (Carl's Jr./Hardee's seem to generally fall into that category). 

Even with the redesign of the $100 bill, spending those can be trickier.  As has been explained elsewhere on this forum, it's often fear of running low on smaller bills needed for other customers if they give a lot of change on a $100, not just getting stuck with a counterfeit big bill. 

[1995hoo]

If I need to break a $100 but don't want to make a larger purchase, I'll sometimes go to a grocery store, pick out a cheap item (even just a candy bar), and use the self-checkout machine. It never complains about a $100 bill or about making change!

[Scott5114]

Anyway, I find dollar bills (I've seen a few, actually) a bit bland with only green on them. I prefer euro notes (As they are called) with different colors for each value.

We have that now. Fives are pink, tens are gold, twenties are green, fifties are purple, hundreds are blue.

[bugo]

We should keep the $1 coin, $1 bill, $2 bill, $5 bill and add a $3 bill, an $8 bill, a $13 bill, a $21 bill and so on until a $987 bill.

[jeffandnicole]

We should keep the $1 coin, $1 bill, $2 bill, $5 bill and add a $3 bill, an $8 bill, a $13 bill, a $21 bill and so on until a $987 bill.

I'd like bills that include sales taxes. A $5.34 bill and a $10.69 bill will be convenient for me.

[rickmastfan67]

If I need to break a $100 but don't want to make a larger purchase, I'll sometimes go to a grocery store, pick out a cheap item (even just a candy bar), and use the self-checkout machine. It never complains about a $100 bill or about making change!

Don't try doing this in the Pittsburgh area @ Giant Eagle (or anywhere else they have stores).  They recently required you to have your 'loyalty' card to activate the machines.  Otherwise, you need to go to a staffed line.

[signalman]

We should keep the $1 coin, $1 bill, $2 bill, $5 bill and add a $3 bill, an $8 bill, a $13 bill, a $21 bill and so on until a $987 bill.

I'd like bills that include sales taxes. A $5.34 bill and a $10.69 bill will be convenient for me.

These posts reminded me of this clip...1:39-2:42 is the relevent segment.

[Pete from Boston]

Don't try doing this in the Pittsburgh area @ Giant Eagle (or anywhere else they have stores).  They recently required you to have your 'loyalty' card to activate the machines.  Otherwise, you need to go to a staffed line.

Holy crap!  A two-tiered checkout class system!

I suppose Crane & Co. again will be the opposition to this, but I wonder if we'll ever give up paper currency altogether like Canada and start printing plastic bills.