US Mint: Wasting Money By Making Money - ABC News
By JONATHAN KARL (@jonkarl) ,
ROBIN GRADISON and BEN FORER
July 14, 2011
The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia is a big, noisy, busy operation,
capable of minting nearly 2 million presidential dollar coins daily. But most
of those coins go into storage, never seeing the light of day. Costing 32 cents
apiece to produce, these manganese brass dollars have proven unpopular with a
public that prefers paper.
ABC News went to
one such storage facility, the Federal Reserve in Baltimore, where the coins
are in plastics bags and cardboard boxes, stacked one on top of another,
creating several aisles of presidential coinage worth millions of dollars.
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In their most
recent annual report to Congress, the Federal Reserve says the coins are piling
up so quickly they will need to spend $650,000 to build a new vault in Dallas to hold them. Shipping
the coins to the new secure facility will cost an additional $3 million.
Passed by Congress
in 2005, the Presidential $1 Coin Act ordered the mint to make millions of
coins to honor every dead president, but not even Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., one
of the co-sponsors of the original bill, uses the legal tender.
"Do you use
these things? Do you have any of these things in your pocket?" Reed was
asked by ABC News' Jonathan Karl while holding the dollar coins. "I don't
I tell you, but I like everyone else repeatedly use nickels, dimes, quarters.
In fact I have a little jar in my car for the traffic meters."
Reed and other
senators sent a letter Tuesday to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
and Mint Acting Director Richard Peterson asking for help in improving the program
while eliminating waste of taxpayer resources.
Meanwhile, the
coins keep coming off the production lines, already more than a billion made
and counting. The Fed's report estimates that they could have more than $2
billion in excess $1 coins by the time the program is expected to end five
years from now.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-mint-wasting-money-making-money/story?id=14052997