Mad and bewildered Presidents

Earlier today, the U.S. Mint provided a sneak peak of the four Presidential $1 dollar coins that will be released in 2008.

Following last year's group of four coins featuring the first four presidents, next year will see odd caricatures of James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.

The look on George Washington's face says it all - a copper coin blended with small parts zinc and nickel along with some manganese to provide the appearance of gold is just a bad idea.

It is almost a mockery of what the founding fathers thought money should be, even without the weird images.

They'll clink just like other base metal money and the bigger the base metal coin the dopier it is. According to Coinflation, the nickel has a higher melt value (almost 6 cents versus 5.5 cents for the new dollars) because the nickel actually uses the metal nickel which costs about four times what copper fetches these days.

The Presidential $1 coins are glorified pennies.

Uh, actually, make that "pre-1982 pennies" since only those were made mostly of copper versus today's shinier ones that are made out of zinc (copper pennies have a melt value of over 2 cents).

Here are next year's coins:
James Monroe looks like some sort of Cro-Magnon man, Andrew Jackson looks bewildered, and John Quincy Adams looks like a child molester or ax murderer, possibly a combination of the two. Martin Van Buren is about the only one that looks mostly normal, but then he was kind of odd looking in real life so, they probably just didn't know how to deal with that.

Obviously, they got some of the images from the same place they did for this page at the White House website, but all they had to do was go to Wikipedia to get better images with which to start.

This isn't the first time criticism of the U.S. Mint has been voiced here - have a look at this commentary about something I wrote some time ago about the dopey "numismatist" commercials which can still be seen on TV from time to time.