Money for the Blind. What Side Affects Might There Be?

Sometimes our wonderful system tends to trip over its own feet. Take the case where a federal judge has ruled that paper money discriminates against the blind and gives the Treasury department 30 days to begin working on a solution. Now, on the surface this seems like a good idea to allow vision impaired people to determine the denomination of their money, but are we setting ourselves up for even more expense to everyone?

Several methods may be considered to allow blind people to determine what paper money denomination they are using, including holes punched in the bills, texture on the surface, or different sizes of paper for each denomination. Maybe even rounded corners on the bills in different locations so one bill can be distinguished from another.

Suppose we adopt the standard like other countries where different denominations of money is a different size? What would that mean to the rest of us? Think about where paper money is used and what side affects a different size would have. ATM machines come to mind. In 2004 there were 370,000 ATM machines across the US or about 1 for every 300 people. What expense would there be to upgrade these machines to handle different size bills, and of course the counting mechanism and software within the machine would need to be updated.

What about vending machines? These machines normally take change or a paper bill (usually a dollar) to allow purchasing the contents of the machine. Here again, an expense would be incurred to allow them to accept a different size paper bill. (Those darn machines sometimes barely work even with pristine dollar bills!)

Added to this is the fact that our current money will not just disappear overnight, so each of these machines will need handle current money and the new money, adding even more to the expense.