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After 25 years of the loonie, could it be that one of Canada’s most-loved symbols has just been a secret tax this whole time?

On the surface, the argument for coins seems simple: Coins last longer than bills, so they save money on production costs.

“Almost all industrialized countries have eliminated small-denomination bills, because metal objects last longer than paper ones,” wrote the Washington Post in a March endorsement of the U.S. dollar coin.

But according to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, production costs are moot: The United States is so good at making $1 bills, that the government would actually lose $179-million a year by issuing dollar coins.

Where the dollar coin excels, strangely, is in the simple fact that it is inconvenient.

“What we found is that people use coins differently,” the GAO’s Lorelei St. James told the Los Angeles Times this week. “You’re more likely to have dollar coins and hold those … those are going to go into your coin jar. With dollar bills you typically don’t do that.”

So many coins get socked away, in fact, that whenever a country switches from a bill to a coin — as Canada, Australia and the U.K. have done — they have to make at least 1.5 coins for every one bill just to account for all the unspent change lying around.

Indeed, on the eve of the loonie’s introduction, Canada had 300 million dollar bills in circulation. By the close of the 1980s, ”almost 600 million coins were produced to adequately supply the marketplace,” wrote Royal Canadian Mint spokeswoman Christine Aquino in an email to the Post.