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.
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