Did David Vitter pay his escorts with coins? That's the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the junior Republican U.S. Senator from Louisiana, best known for his role as a client of prostitution in the D.C. Madam scandal, has introduced a bill calling for the U.S. Mint to halt the production of $1 presidential coins. What else could Vitter have against these patriotic dollars?

In fact, there's an important fiscal reason to end the program, which began in 2007 -- the same year Vitter was exposed as a paying philanderer, as it happens. The coins never caught on. By 2011, the Federal Reserve had 1.4 billion of the coins in reserve and had planned to spend $650,000 constructing a new storage facility for the surplus. But Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ordered production stopped aside from small amounts sold directly to collectors. So while more than 340 million George Washington coins were minted to start the series, there's less than 10 million Benjamin Harrison coins. William McKinley is the first one up for minting in 2013. Even without Vitter's bill, the series is set to end by 2016 with the Ronald Reagan coin.

The thinking behind the coins, aside from the commemoration, was that Americans, like Europeans, might prefer dollar coins to bills. The €5 bill is the Euro's smallest paper denomination. Last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated that switching from $1 bills to $1 coins would save $4.4 billion over the next 30 years. But there hasn't been public or Congressional pressure to make the switch.

As unpopular as they are with the public, Vitter has introduced similar legislation twice before without success. "Even though many in Congress, including myself, hoped that dollar coins would eventually save taxpayers money, it's turned out to be one of those unnecessary and, quite frankly, wasteful programs that we should eliminate," Vitter said in 2011. "Banks and credit unions are increasingly returning the dollar coins to the Federal Reserve because people don't want them and aren't using them. So the most sensible thing to do is for Congress to quit spending taxpayer dollars producing and storing the unwanted coins."

Vitter's co-sponsor for the 2011 attempt was the aptly named South Carolina Republican, Jim DeMint.

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