what opinion polls have said — 70 percent of you prefer to keep the paper bills, according to Lincoln Park Strategies.

Change, as both sides agree, is difficult. That’s a statement that has two meanings. We don’t want those things dragging down our pants.

But the Dollar Coin Alliance says the Sussies and Sacagaweas failed because the government tried to run two systems at once. What needs to happen, they say, is for the government to completely eliminated dollar bills, then mint the coins.

People will complain, as they did when the government forced everyone to change to digital television, but they soon will get used to it. And getting used to it means saving the government money, without raising taxes or cutting any programs.

I’m writing about this because, at a congressional hearing this week, the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office once again recommended the switch to coins. It was the eighth time in 22 years the GAO has done so.

But, even in a time of economic distress, the message isn’t any more likely to take hold this time than in the past.

I spoke with Shawn Smeallie, executive director of the Dollar Coin Alliance. He has some logical reasons for making the switch.

“This is a product of inflation,” he said. Today, the dollar is worth approximately what a quarter was worth in the 1970s. “Would we want to have a paper quarter? At some point it becomes ridiculous to have a paper dollar.”

The average dollar bill circulates for 4.7 years before it becomes unusable and has to be shredded and put in the landfill. A coin can remain in use about 40 years before it degrades, and then it could be melted down to create some more.

The difference would save about $11 billion, Smeallie said. That’s not enough to move the nation even an inch from the fiscal cliff, but “if we can’t do even this much, it sends a bad signal.”

Smeallie has answers to all the common objections. To people who say they don’t want to be weighed down by coins, he comes back with: “How many dollar bills do you have in your wallet right now?” Most people don’t have many. That means they wouldn’t have many dollar coins.

He even plays the “distrust of the Federal Reserve” card. The Fed makes 95 cents off every dollar printed, he said. The U.S. Mint would create dollar coins and sell them at face value. This is why, he said, the Fed stands in the way of any move to a coin.

Here is why the change won’t happen, at least not at this time:

First, dollar bills — greenbacks, lettuce, the mean green, the almighty dollar — are a big part of American culture, and the dollar remains the world’s leading currency. Turning it into a coin would be seen by politicians, and many in the public, as sending a bad signal to the rest of the world.

Second, the nation is rapidly become cashless. We use credit cards, we shop online, we now use mobile phone payment apps. If it costs less to mint coins than it does to print bills, think how much less it will cost to do nothing.

Smeallie laughs at that, saying we won’t be cashless until we fly around in “George Jetson cars.”

He’s right that low-income people still rely on cash and that you still need it to ride a lot of mass-transit systems, but Americans use much less cash than they did a few years ago, and the trend is accelerating.

Here’s an idea to save money: Instead of doing away with $1 bills, just reduce their size each year commensurate with the inflation rate. That saves on the cost of paper and ink and is a constant reminder to the public that the dollar is literally shrinking.

Eventually, when dollars are the size of the strips that come out of a paper shredder, people will demand coins.

works with and offering thanks for the opportunity to be on the show.

He did not, however, retract the f-word — filth — that seemed to have so many people atwitter (quite literally, if you check Tweets under the hashtag #angusjones).

But no matter. If you have a religious conversion and attack the content of Hollywood shows, especially when that goes against your own financial interests, you must be brainwashed.

Do you get the rich irony here? Let me spell it out for you.

The Parents Television Council, also frequently derided by Hollywood apologists, describes the content of Two and a Half Men as containing frequent foul language and “a constant barrage of sexual scenes and jokes.” It goes into considerable detail as to what this means specifically, which I won’t do here — the Parents Television Council actually documents and enumerates such things.

The bottom line from the council is that “The content on Two and a Half Men is not appropriate for children of any age.” Why limit that to just children?

Five years ago, the American Psychological Association issued a report on what it called the “sexualization of girls.” It was a compilation of scholarly research, which consistently supported the conclusion that society’s ever-increasing sexualization of girls and women is leading to unhealthy results, and not just for girls.

"More general societal effects may include an increase in sexism; fewer girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; increased rates of sexual harassment and sexual violence; and an increased demand for child pornography," the report said.

This sexualization, evident in popular programs, movies and advertisements, has even been shown to diminish a young woman’s ability to perform mathematical equations or think logically.

Apparently, when popular TV characters make crude jokes or use women only for gratification, these cultural media messages make young women think they are of less value, while also diminishing the way young boys view them.

The report defined “sexualization” as a message that “a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or sexual behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics…”

The Parents Television Council used that definition to examine prime-time television shows. It found young girls being sexualized as much as adult women. “About 93 percent of sexual incidents among underage characters fit the APA’s category of ‘unhealthy’ sexuality,” it said.

The consistent presentation of uncommitted sex as entertainment and young women, in particular, as little more than objects is, it seems, affecting how people think about themselves and the world around them.

Sounds like brainwashing to me.

Two and a Half Men may direct most of its jokes at male behavior, but that hardly matters. It is one more part of a prime time cultural barrage that coarsens behavior and cheapens what ought to be valued and protected.

I don’t know the level of Jones’ commitment to what he said on YouTube, but he was spot on.

“If you watch Two and a Half Men,” he said, “please stop watching Two and a Half Men … Please stop watching it and filling your head with filth."

That may be the sanest thing I’ve heard from a prime time actor in a long time.

The Democrats are just as bull-headed about entitlement reforms, but to be fair, they haven’t signed any pledges.

The Norquist pledge looks simple, but it’s not.

Norquist is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform. He started getting Republicans to sign a pledge not to raise taxes back in the mid-1980s. In the early ‘90s, the first President Bush famously violated his own “Read my lips” declaration against tax hikes and supported raising the highest marginal income tax rate to 31 percent. The rate climbed again to 39.6 percent in 1993, where it held until the “temporary” tax cuts of the George W. Bush era reduced them to 35 percent.

A lot of lawmakers have been elected since those tax cuts, and many others have been around since before that time. If those cuts were temporary, would a return to the previous rate really be considered a violation of the pledge?

Norquist believes so.

But if you agree, and you truly hold to the no-new-tax pledge, you also would oppose Republican-led proposals to reform the tax code and eliminate loopholes. Each loophole, after all, is a tax cut for one special interest or another. Removing the loophole is a tax hike for someone out there. Take away the mortgage deduction and see how much more the average family has to pay.

Simply put, the tax pledge keeps Washington from doing anything meaningful toward closing the gap between revenues and expenditures. If Republicans aren’t going to come a little way, Democrats won’t, either. And Democrats have the legitimate argument of claiming a slight edge from the recent election.

Norquist has likened the pledge to a wedding vow. "I hope his wife understands the commitments last a little longer than two years or something," he said in response to Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who said the pledge should be only for the congressional session during which it was signed.

That’s an interesting comparison, given the record some politicians have in regard to their marital vows.

But it actually cheapens marriage vows, which come with some legal enforcements and protections, and which are vital to civil society and the raising of children.

No legislative body can limit or control a future legislative body, nor should an elected official be kept from dealing with problems because of conditions that existed long ago.

Norquist never has been elected to anything. Republicans signed his pledge because, as politicians, they understood the public wanted to hold the line on taxes. The public now seems to have changed its mind, based on election results and exit-polling.

If Republicans were to offer tax reforms, loophole eliminations and a slight increase in the top marginal rate, the pressure would be squarely on Democrats to offer their own concessions.

The alternative — doing nothing — won’t destroy the country on Jan. 1. But it would signal that politicians have little intention of hammering out solutions to the nation’s serious long-term fiscal problems.

Politics will have lost its art in the name of bull-headed ideology.

big part of why the economic collapse of 2008 has had such a long-lasting effect?

Even if risky behavior by financial institutions, fueled by bad government incentives, was the main reason institutions teetered or collapsed, debts on a personal level made it much harder for people to weather the storm.

So now we are told that Black Friday sales were strong but not spectacular, but that online sales topped $1 billion. But we’re also being told, as this ABC News report said, that consumers “cranked up their use of credit cards in the third quarter.”

The report cited figures from TransUnion, a credit-reporting agency, that the credit card debt per borrower grew 4.9 percent during that quarter, as compared to a year ago, to $4,996.

Round that off to $5,000. That doesn’t seem like the kind of figure most people could pay off each month when the bill comes due.

On Forbes.com this week, Panos Mourdoukoutas wrote about good debt and bad debt. It’s pretty simple, really. Good debt buys something that will increase in value, whether that is an education that will lead to a lucrative career or a small-business loan.

Bad debt is money we borrow for things we don’t really need, and at terms that are onerous and, frankly, ridiculous.

Why do people accumulate bad debt? Mourdoukoutas said you can blame the emotional side of your brain. He quotes author Jonah Lehrer.

““Paying with plastic fundamentally changes the way we spend money, altering the calculus of our financial decisions. When you buy something with cash, the purchase involves an actual loss — your wallet is literally lighter.”

This blog by Anisha Sekar on USNews.com, says much the same. “Paying with cash gives that visceral feeling of forking over money, making you more aware of your purchases than an electronic transfer ever could.”

That’s sound advice. Unfortunately, with mobile devices increasingly being used to pay at the register, the world is moving farther and farther away from cash.

That’s too bad. Imagine if political leaders had a giant warehouse full of cash from tax revenues. They might feel a little differently when it all ran out and they had to go borrow more.

But that’s pure fantasy — just like imagining politicians being thrown off a literal cliff if they can’t reach a compromise by the end of the year.

are things you either have or you don’t.

Because of holiday deadlines, I’m writing this before “black Friday” (or is it “black Thursday” now?) If history holds, it will be a time of pushing, coveting and desperate grabbing, and much of this bad behavior won’t be done with the intent of giving to anyone else.

According to marketingcharts.com, one study has found that 8 in 10 Black Friday shoppers intend to buy things for themselves.

That’s a confusing way to kick off a season that is supposed to be marked by generosity, love and charity. The annual convergence of consumerism’s biggest moment with the celebration of Christ’s birth can breed some stark inconsistencies.

The only time I decided to experience black Friday — on a cold predawn nine years ago — I felt anything but the Christmas spirit. The woman who kept ramming me from behind with her shopping cart didn’t have what I would call a child-like gleam in her eyes.

So it can be both instructive and calming to turn from the chaotic scene of holiday madness and look at examples of people who put honesty ahead of everything else. If you look for such things, you quickly find that Truman’s museum is just a minor example in a flood of the virtue-over-profit spirit.

You’ll find the 13-year-old boy in New Zealand who returned a wallet containing $80 and credit cards to a jogger who lost it on a beach. The jogger said it restored his faith in human nature.

You’ll find a woman in the Boston area who last week thought she might have found the perfect gift for her daughter-in-law in a department store. Then she realized the handbag hanging on a rack belonged to someone, and it had $11,000 in cash inside, all in rolled-up $100 bills.

The woman, Cheryl Gavazzi, could have left it hanging, but she decided the right thing to do was to turn it into the police. She didn’t want to trust such a large amount to the store’s young cashiers. She also worried the money represented someone’s ill-gotten gain.

“I ran to the car, threw it in the front seat and locked my doors, looking for drug dealers following me,” she said, describing herself as a “nervous wreck.”

The police found the owner, a man who had collected the cash from a fund-raiser for a new church in Guatemala, and who had put it in his wife’s bag. The man was contemplating canceling Christmas and selling his car to cover his loss when the bag was returned.

Or there was the assistant manager at a Taco Bell in Merced, Calif., who found a yellow purse and went to great lengths to return it to a woman who had just been passing through town.

His mother, he said, just had a lost camera returned by a conscientious person. “That’s how it should be,” he had thought, and that made his actions easier.

Then there are the “layaway angels” who show up seemingly out of nowhere to pay a stranger’s layaway bills at stores nationwide.

The examples seem to never end. Like the Truman Library paying a past debt, they remind us that goodness, and the true spirit of the season, still remain strong.

Well, a small percentage of Maine is, in fact, black, and Webster later apologized for his remarks.

But that one never passed the smell test. If you were going to rig a presidential election, you would look for a more effective way than to send only dozens of conspicuous people into rural Maine to somehow cast ballots they weren’t registered to obtain.

Now on to the head-scratchers:

In 59 Philadelphia voting districts, Mitt Romney received zero votes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The same happened in nine inner-city Cleveland districts, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Really?

It’s easy to believe President Obama would win those districts by an overwhelming majority, but totally and completely unanimous? Even in his rigged elections, Saddam Hussein never got 100 percent.

And Mitt Romney, it’s worth noting, only got 78 percent of the Mormon vote.

But, frankly, a rigged result like that would be too obvious, which argues against fraud.

Finally, Florida once again proved that, if it were an independent nation, it would make Haiti’s elections look good.

In St. Lucie County, 247,383 votes were counted. The only problem with that is that the number of registered voters there is 175,554.

This blogger called it a massive fraud. Officials, however, explained that the ballot was so long some voters submitted two voting cards. The actual turnout was said to be about 70 percent, which some conservatives think is still suspicious.

So what’s going on?

Look, no election, especially one involving more than 100 million voters, can be held without some strange problems. I’ve spoke with election clerks that tell of all kinds of odd things, mostly involving equipment problems and mostly in races where the outcome was not otherwise in doubt, so the problems didn’t come to light. I doubt any presidential election in U.S. history has been without these oddities, and there certainly have been instances of real fraud.

However, none of the above instances was of a scope large enough to change the outcome of the election. I’m also not sure they would have been changed by the requirement of a photo I.D.

That doesn’t mean states shouldn’t require I.D., as long as it makes them readily available to those voters who otherwise don’t have one. Any step toward making elections more secure is a good one.

Politics, after all, is a conduit to power, and power can tempt people to do some strange and desperate things.

Jal Mehta, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, puts it this way: “We put reforms through our existing system, and when they do not work as we had hoped, we ask what is wrong with the reform, when we should instead be asking what is wrong with the system.”

Mehta’s thoughts were published last week by the American Enterprise Institute. He presented what he calls five pathways to completely reshaping schools. Each is different, and each is radical. And each would take a long time to work.

The idea is that stakeholders, from politicians right down to parents, need to decide how to proceed. But whatever happens needs to be radical.

His first pathway would be to take what is a bureaucratic system and make it a professional one. Change every aspect of how teachers are recruited and trained. Make it harder to achieve tenure and demonstrate teaching mastery.

With time, Mehta believes, a “new knowledge infrastructure” would be created within the profession and teachers would be treated more like those in other professions — as experts with “a degree of professional power.”

His second idea would be to reform schools from the outside in, letting a new education infrastructure, already forming in the private sector, replace the old. Private charter operators and alternative teacher certification providers are providing new pathways in the new century.

Mehta’s third idea is to take everything apart and put it back together differently. Instead of schools that offer traditional math, science, English and history, let schools serve as general contractors that hire outside organizations to teach each specialty.

This could be done by a combination of online and in-person methods. Students could customize learning to fit their needs, allowing creativity and fostering curiosity and the love of learning.

He compares this system to a hospital. Star teachers, like specialized surgeons, would be in demand and would come with a range of support personnel to perform tasks. Some might, for example, teach only fractions to elementary students, rather than, under the current system, a range of math skills to just one fourth grade class.

The fourth idea would be to change the relationship between schools and the rest of society. The idea here is to compensate for knowledge lost during the summer break or, in some cases, for poor learning environments in neighborhoods.

This may require governments to provide programs before and after school, and perhaps workshops for new parents in an effort to help kids prepare to begin school. His vision goes far beyond what some cities currently offer, involving a network of agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Finally, he suggests dissolving the school system entirely and giving students a more direct line to the ever-expanding world of knowledge.

Schools, he notes, are “frozen in time.” They still hand out textbooks and use computers as electronic workbooks. Meanwhile, Google is creating a vast digital archive of knowledge and even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provides free access to its lectures.

Learning has never been so exciting. Why not let kids pursue their natural interests, with adult supervision? Why not move away from committees that certify what children should read and learn?

Why not, indeed? In the end, Mehta acknowledges that big changes will be hard, given the reality of public school structures. I could add that parents, who often let emotions color their view of schools, tend to stand in the way of change, as well.

To be clear, I don’t endorse any of these proposals. But they are not quick fixes, and they are radical. Those are essential ingredients for truly moving education forward in a new century.

Arizona first approved the idea of making it legal to smoke marijuana for medicinal purposes only. Critics tried to argue that the real aim was to pave the way for a full legalization of the drug for any purpose at all.

They were drowned out by calls to help AIDS victims who, it was said, needed the drug to alleviate pain that could be treated no other way.

The New York Times quoted the president of the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, James E. Copple, saying that was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“They’re using the AIDS victims and terminally ill as props to promote the use of marijuana,” he said, “It’s a brilliant diversionary tactic.”

Well, the disguise is now off, but, according to plan, too many Americans now see the wolf as a sheep.

A majority of voters in Colorado and Washington state decided Tuesday to legalize marijuana for recreational use. If medicinal marijuana established a beachhead, this was a major incursion by the invasion force.

Supporters called it a first step toward ending what they call “prohibition” nationwide.

That’s important and strategic rhetoric. Linking the effort to a period of history generally thought to have been a huge failure — the brief constitutional prohibition of alcohol sales — is another tactic to gain hearts and minds.

Despite the victory in two states, legal marijuana still has many Americans divided. A similar measure failed in Oregon. Voters in Arkansas defeated a measure to legalize the drug for medicinal purposes, while Massachusetts approved such a law. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia already allow consumption under limited circumstances.

This comes at a time when legislatures nationwide are looking for ways to outlaw new creative forays into the hallucinogenic arts, from the use of Spice, which contains a synthetic form of the chemical that makes  marijuana potent, to Ivory Wave, mephedrone tablets and, believe it or not, the smoking or excess consumption of nutmeg.

The tugs and pulls in different directions send strange, mixed messages to the nation’s youth.

Since the beginning of time, people have sought ways to alter their minds through stimulants. Generally, governments have recognized a need to control and discourage this for the protection and well being of society at large. People who aren’t in their right minds tend to do things that, quite simply, aren’t right.

Although regulated, alcohol has gotten a pass because of its historical acceptance in society and because it can be consumed in responsible ways. But there can be no denying it is the source of a host of societal ills. Expanding the list of legal mind-altering substances makes no sense.

As Charles Stimson wrote recently for the Heritage Foundation, the oft-cited claim that legalizing marijuana would stop drug-related crime and sap the strength of cartels and gangs has no basis in fact. Legalization will increase demand, which likely will be met in part by cartels and underground markets offering versions more potent than the government allows.

Meanwhile, the stories of those whose lives are ruined by marijuana, like the facts about its harmful effects on respiratory health, the heart and cognitive abilities, tend to be downplayed or ignored.

Voters in Washington and Colorado haven’t had the last word on this issue. Marijuana use still violates federal law, and a states’ rights showdown is looming.

But it’s instructive to see how attitudes have shifted in less than 20 years. As with gambling as some other ills that obviously harm the general welfare, Utah may one day find itself a lonely outpost in the drug war, as well — the only state willing to see the drug for what it is.