Jingle jangle of dollars in your pocket

Zip up your pockets. Hide your wallets. Plans are afoot for the federal government to take all of your dollar bills away.

Oh, it's just in the tentative stages now. You may not have even heard much about it.

The Clinton administration has indicated to Rep. Jim Kolbe that it may be willing to consider replacing the dollar bill with a dollar coin. Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona, is the chairman of the treasury, postal service and general government appropriations subcommittee. Kolbe for years has advocated a dollar coin, and he made it evident recently that in his new position as head of the subcommittee overseeing the U.S. Treasury, he will push hard for the coin. "It's inevitable," he said.

You may be asking: What's so bad about a dollar coin? It has been tried before - and if people don't want to carry the coins, they don't have to. They can just use dollar bills, the way they always have.

You're missing the point. The government has figured something out: The American people, given the choice between dollar bills and dollar coins, will always choose the bills. The only way to make dollar coins work is to take dollar bills away.

The government learned its lesson with the Susan B. Anthony dollar. That coin - slightly larger than a quarter, featuring a portrait of the famous suffragist on one side and a likeness of an eagle landing on the moon on the other - was introduced in the summer of 1979 and almost immediately became one of the great failures of any kind in the history of the nation.

People hated it - despised it. Not only would they not carry the Susan B. Anthony dollars - they didn't even like to touch the things. Frank De Leo, a Bureau of the Mint official at the time, said, "There is an extraordinary amount of resistance. The public just doesn't seem to go for it. As far as I can tell, this coin isn't being accepted anywhere."

The government was so desperate it actually hired a public relations agency in an attempt to get Americans to try the coins. Think of it: a PR firm to promote money. And you paid for the publicity.

After the publicity campaign had failed, I spoke with the executive vice president of the PR firm - Michael Friedman, of DWJ Associates in New York. "Our job was to get the good story out about the coin," he told me. "But we made a false assumption. We assumed there would be good stories to get out. There weren't.

"We were looking for any little piece of good news about the coin, so we could feed it to the networks and the wire services. The stories didn't have to come from big cities; we were looking for the little town that decided to pay everyone in Susan B. Anthony coins - that kind of thing. We'd take anything. Spokane, San Luis Obispo, Dover-Foxcroft, Mobile ... Our feeling was that as soon as something good happened, we could start to build a success. But nothing good ever happened. Anywhere.

"All the publicity in the world can't sell something that people don't want. You want to know what hurt the coin? The coin hurt the coin."

And now the push for a dollar coin is beginning again. The government's reason for wanting to do this is the same as before: Because coins last longer than bills, they are more cost-effective in the long run.

Except Americans like dollar bills. For one thing, dollar bills send off the signal that a dollar still means something. A dollar is not a coin. A dollar is ... a dollar. A dollar bill.

But you can bet that the government won't make the same mistake this time it made last time. When the Susan B. Anthony coin was failing, the assistant director of technology for the U.S. Mint, Dr. Alan J. Goldman, told it to me directly:

"To make this coin fly, you've got to force it into use. As long as people are given a free choice, they will not use this coin."

Stella B. Hackel, director of the Mint at the time the Anthony coin was introduced, and the coin's chief supporter, told me: "I just don't understand the resistance. People can learn."

If Kolbe and the pro-dollar-coin people on his side get their way, you can be certain that not only will people be expected to learn - they will be made to learn. If there is a new dollar coin minted, it will be in conjunction with a non-voluntary program to get rid of dollar bills. Kolbe has said when the Anthony coin was introduced without an accompanying government order to withdraw dollar bills from circulation, "that was the fatal flaw."

You'll learn. You'll have to. Bet you a dollar.

Chicago Tribune