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Biden: US scrapping dollar coins to save government money
Vice President Biden announced Tuesday that the U.S. Mint would discontinue production of presidential dollar coins.
Stopping production of the coins is part of the Obama administration’s Campaign to Cut Waste. Biden’s announcement came at a Cabinet meeting focused on that campaign.
The production of the coins came about in 2005 through the Presidential $1 Coin Act, which calls for the Mint to produce $1 coins with the image of each deceased president. Almost half of the coins that have been minted, though, have been returned to the Federal Reserve, and now 1.4 billion coins are sitting in the Federal Reserve vaults, according to the administration.
The Obama administration predicts discontinuing the coins will save Americans $50 million in costs from storage and production.
A small number of presidential coins will still be produced by demand for sale to coin collectors, but making those coins won’t bring an additional cost to taxpayers, the administration said.
“Putting a stop to the minting of surplus $1 coins represents a significant opportunity to reduce costs and improve efficiency,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in a news release. “In these tough times, Americans are making every dollar count, and they deserve the same from their government. We simply shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer money on money that taxpayers aren’t using.”
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