Bankruptcy

Can you tell a $1 from a $20 with your eyes closed?

By Adam Levitin

If you're vision-impaired it can be difficult or impossible to distinguish US paper currency of different denominations. Unlike just about every other Western country, all of our bills are the same size, same color (excluding some recent changes to keep the North Korean government's counterfeiters at bay), and same texture. The inability to distinguish between paper currency denominations makes the vision-impaired extremely vulnerable in cash transactions; they can easily tender too much money or receive too little change. The American Council of the Blind sued and won in district court over the Treasury's objections to the cost and bother of having to change the currency. (One wonders how that compares to the cost and bother of litigation....) Now the D.C. Circuit has upheld the district court. Treasury may yet appeal, but money might look and feel very different in coming years.

Frankly, as someone who is not vision impaired, more easily distinguishable bills will make me feel much more comfortable dealing with cash--I won't having that nagging worry that I handed the cabbie a $20 instead of a $10.

Curiously, the dissent seemed particularly concerned with the impact on third parties, like vending machine makers, if the currency were changed. That strikes me as quite strange--isn't this a problem every time the currency is updated. I know there are still plenty of machines that won't take the new $20s. This just strikes me as a known risk of being in the vending machine business.

Full post as published by Credit Slips on May 20, 2008 (boomark / email).