BeyondGenius.com

The battle today between the courts and the Treasury Department is not so much about the color of money, but the shape of it. As anyone who has ever had a friend or family member who was blind or near to it knows, the greenback is a problem. Ones are the same as tens, or fifties, or hundreds. Without outside assistance, it is impossible for someone with vision problems to navigate a cash transaction. It would seem that yes, it would make some kind of sense to not effectively discriminate against a part of your population when it comes to currency – most other countries have bills and coins of varying sizes for that reason (plus it’s usefulness in preventing counterfeiting). Beyond that, the ADA has already made businesses and other governmental institutions make changes to increase accessibility for the disabled – why not Treasury?

Treasury’s argument, which I think rings false, is that it would be expensive to create the new bills – if the cost of money were a concern, we wouldn’t still have the penny. While yes, new plates and inks and whatnot would be required (to say nothing of an informational campaign, similar to what they did when they started releasing the “new” dollars a couple of years ago), the cost of creating new money is kind of a drop in the proverbial budget bucket. Changing currency is a pain in the neck, but it’s nothing massive or world-changing in a financial sense (like a revaluation would be).

While harder to quantify, the loss of the dollar’s iconic qualities would be the result of a change-over to new money. While minor changes have been made in recent years, for the most part American money has very specific qualities – it’s green, and it’s all the same shape. There is a loss to be had in new currency – the loss of the image of the dollar bill. Changing the dollar would change the image of the bill, and could even theoretically hurt people’s ability to recognize or spend it abroad. I have problems spending a $2 here in the states – I can only imagine the result of handing an odd-sized pink slip of paper to a shop teller in Greece and trying to explain that it’s the new $5.

Sadly, as much as one might mourn the loss of the staid-equally sized, uniformly green currency, it is a step that does need to be made. Outside of our sentiment for the bills (and the very real effect of the bill’s icon status), there’s no good reason to disenfranchise someone from the most basic form of our system of exchange. With the baby-boomers aging, we’ll have more and more people with difficulty seeing, which should give the mint some urgency. Regardless, I think that Treasury will fight hard to protect the greenback, so it will be a bit yet before you can kiss it goodbye.