I like the new money. I think the big off center portraits on the bills are much nicer than the old small central portraits. I also think the new quarters are pretty neat, especially the Connecticut one, which is my favorite so far.
Like the Post Office, the US Mint has finally figured out how to generate money from nothing. By having fifty types of quarters, the government can count on a certain number of people to take this money out of circulation, and therefore it can print (or mint) more money than it ordinarily could without risking inflation.
For instance, let's say that one of every hundred people is going to collect a full set of the state quarters. There are fifty coins in the full set (Philadelphia and Denver are both minting them - not sure about San Francisco, but those would be proofs anyway), so the complete set costs $12.50 to collect. Roughly estimating the population of the US to be about 250 million, that works out to $31.25 million dollars which never makes it into circulation. If the proportion is one in ten instead of one in a hundred, that number rises to a third of a billion dollars.
This money is spread over ten years, so it's not all that significant, but I would imagine that we can expect to see a lot more commemorative currency being minted in the coming years. The Post Office issues a new series of stamps every few months, and these are big revenue generators. Too bad all of the stamp collectors end up footing the bill.
You can respond to my ranting here.
Don't take any wooden rants.