Need a Billion $1 Coins? Nobody Else Does Either.

But I know where you can get them if you change your mind:

In the basement of a Baltimore vault the size of a soccer field, 1 billion dollar coins are just sitting there. Thanks, Congress.

NPR’s Planet Money reporters recently investigated the $1 presidential coin program, which was a Congressional effort to get more $1 coins into circulation while also trying to be educational.

The problem is that nobody really wants them. Well, not nobody. Sixty percent of the coins make it into circulation. But that other 40 percent? They’re sitting in vaults. In fact, the Fed’s even running out of space for them.

Each coin costs the government 30 cents to make, so the piles in those vaults have cost the government $300 million so far, according to NPR.

The whole thing started in 2005, when the Presidential $1 Coin Act was written into law. While the legislation seemed to have good intentions, when the U.S. Mint started producing the coins a couple years later, the demand just wasn’t there. I mean, had you even heard of the presidential $1 coins, let alone seen one?

At the same time, the legislation mandated that a certain number of Sacagawea coins be made in conjunction with the presidential coins, which has now amounted to one Sacagawea for every president. And I think we know how well those coins went over....

At the moment, the program is still moving forward, and NPR projects that by the time it’s finished, 2 billion coins could be sitting in the Fed’s vaults.

Just to show you how successful the marketing plan for this presidential dollar coin program has been, it's been around since the law passed in 2005 and I just heard about it today...and I'd like to think of myself as a relatively well-informed person. I have seen a Sacagawea coin a time or two, but couldn't get rid of them fast enough.

This is the classic case of government trying to mandate what the market wants and failing rather badly.