Loose change, again

The 56 State quarter program ends next year,and congress is planning on a replacement for it. Do we need all these quaters?

In 1930, a bill passed congress authorizing a circulating commemerative quarter dollar coin marking the bicentennial of the birth of George Washington a couple of years hence. There was a competition for a new design, but Andrew Mellon didn't like the fact that a woman had done it, so they started afresh, and the same design won. So they just gave the prize to the first runner up, and that had graced the quarter all the way until 1998. Check out your pocket and you can probably see it.

Then came the 50 State Quarter® program, everyone in the USA has seen those. Well, it was supposed to come to an end this year, but an addition for five territories and DC was surripticiously added late last year (doing it openly wasn't working at all in the senate), ending the program in '09.

So what to do about the 2010 quarter design? Should we go back to the design that was there for most of the late century, do an entirely new one, as was done for the nickel, or something else....maybe a new fifty-six state quarter program?

Now, I've been an avid coin collector since I was a kid, but over a hundred quarter designs over a period of 20 years (four hundred if you include mint marks and silver proofs) is a little bit much. I was all for the one ear extension, but while I"m a fan of the national park system, I think we should just have a brand new design for the Washington quarter and leave it at that for now. (especially what they're planning to do the the dollar coins, which is insane.)