If Congress has their way, and according to the Constitution they should, the United States will soon have new coins in circulation. The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to “coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures.” The House has passed a bill that could save millions of dollars in the cost of minting coins, but the House faces opposition from the Bush administration.

Every penny we mint cost us 1.26 cents and it costs 7.7 cents to make each nickel. Not very economical when you consider the fact that the mint produced about 7.4 billion pennies and 1.2 billion nickels in 2007.

The bill that was passed by the House would require the penny to be composed of steel that is copper plated and would only cost .7 cents to make and the nickle to be composed of mostly steel which would drop the cost of the nickle to below 5 cents. This is not the first time coins like this would have been minted. They were minted during WWII because the other metals were needed for the war effort.

This seems like a fairly simple issue, but there is opposition from not only the administration but the director of the mint as well. The Director says that the bill does not give the Secretary of the Treasury the power to decide the composition of the coins and it also does not give the people and the metals industry enough time to study the situation. As for the administration, well the power is granted only to Congress by the Constitution.

This is not the first time this switch to cheap metals has been proposed. It has come up on several occasions in the past few years. However, this is the first time some definitive action has been taken on the matter. The bill is H.R. 5512 and it is sponsored by Rep. Zach Space, D-Ohio, along with two co-sponsors Rep. Barney Frank D-MA and Rep. Louis Gutierrez D-Illinois. There is a separate bill in the Senate which is still in progress. Once the Senate bill is complete a joint committee will attempt to meld the two bills into one. However, if they don’t act fast in an election year, they never will.

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