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Obama Pushes For Cheaper Pennies
Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports that hidden deep inside in the White House's $3.8 trillion, 2,000-page budget that was sent to Congress this week is a proposal to make pennies and nickels cheaper to produce. Why? Because it currently costs the federal government 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents for every nickel. If passed, the budget would allow the Treasury Department to 'change the composition of coins to more cost-effective materials' resulting in changes that could save more than $100 million a year. Since 1982, our copper-looking pennies have been merely coppery. In the 1970s, the price of copper soared, so President Nixon proposed changing the penny's composition to a cheaper aluminum. Today, only 2.5% of a penny is copper (which makes up the coin's coating) while 97.5% is zinc. The mint did make steel pennies for one year — in 1943 — when copper was needed for the war effort and steel might be a cheaper alternative this time. What about the bill introduced in 2006 that the US abandon pennies altogether.? At the time, fifty-five percent of respondents considered the penny useful compared to 43 percent who agreed it should be eliminated. More telling, 76 percent of respondents said they would pick up a penny if they saw it on the ground."
The vast majority if store clerks wouldn't be able to round up or down to the nearest nickel.
put out as a referendum, let people vote. get rid of them. then comes the sob stories of old cat ladies who now cannot afford food because the price was rounded up 2 cents.
Drop the minimum wage to 8 cents an hour and divide all current cash value by 100.
Think of it: 1c hamburgers, lunch for a dime and leave a 2c tip, and your average American home for $1000.
Also, any transaction dealing with a $100 bill or higher will have to be reported....
In most Euro-countries, prices are rounded to the nearest 5-cent number, 1- and 2-cent coins are quite rare. Why even bother producing coins that are worth more as a material than as a coin?
If it costs 2 pennies to make 1 penny then you have destroyed a penny by making a penny.
Replace coinage with paper currency if you have to, but eliminate all the annoying pocket change.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Our money does not represent actual holdings of the treasury, rather a veritable mortgage on the holdings of the treasury. Why shouldn't our smaller units of currency be converted to paper to reflect this situation and keep costs down, rather than attempting to approximate the actual value of the materials used to produce the currency as we did during the era of the gold standard?
Other great civilizations have done this and it always leads to ruin. The more you debase your currency, the less valuable the actual coins and other forms of currency become, the worse the devaluation gets. The only sane thing here to do is begin discussing plans to fundamentally bolster the foundation of the US dollar, not find ways to make producing it cheaper.
It's not like they're doing the common man any favors. Inflation hits the poor first and hits them hardest. It's a backdoor flat tax.
Australia got rid of 1 and 2c pieces years ago and that didn't kill us at all.
That doesn't mean you people don't advertise things at 99 cents, just that you total up the bill and then round to the nearest 5 cents. Sometimes you win (all of 2 cents on a single bill) and sometimes you lose (again, all of 2 cents on a single bill).
We also ditched $1 and $2 paper currency for $1 and $2 coins. That was also a good move in getting rid of those ratty dollar bills. The US cold easily do the same thing as you already have $1 coins in circulation. About the only people who will notice a change are the strippers who will now have use their coin slots.
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Get rid of pennies and nickels, and replace quarters with half dollar coins. All prices would then have one decimal place instead of two. There would be a lot less useless change floating around; many people discard anything smaller than a dime (or sometimes a quarter) anyway.
This would also make coin-based 3rd grade arithmetic problems much easier.
.. we got rid of the 25 øre in 2008. So now the lowest denomination is 50 øre (around 9 cents). Swedens lowest coin is 1 krone (around 15 cents).
We've been rounding since 1972, and it omes very natural.
Actually, this could be a boon to sellers at brick-and-mortar sites. How? Because they could report the sale in terms of pennies to tax authorities, yet round up to the nearest nickel when asking for payment. And if the nickel was also eliminated, then it would be to a dime. As has been proven in the past on a number of occasions, if you take a few pennies here, and a few there, if this happens enough times, it adds up to real $$.
The Dutch Guilder (Gulden) had its cent removed years ago and when the Euro was introduced it wasn't long before it was agreed the Euro cent would no longer be used either. The latter is a bit more of a hassle since other countries haven't joined but in Holland it works pretty well.
Prices are till in cents but the deal is that if you pay in cash, it is rounded off. On the whole it balances out although if you are REALLY cheap, you pay eletronically when the rounding is in the shops favor and cash when it is in your favor. Items that you tend to buy on their own are already at a 5 center round off. So a cola would cost 95 instead of 99 cents.
It just makes sense, inflation makes prices go up but currency stays the same. So why keep amounts around that just don't make sense anymore? When the euro cent was briefly used everyone here quickly saw how fucking annoying they were, you soon ended up with a huge pile of worthless coins. You have to go pretty far back in time to remember being able to buy anything for a cent. I can barely remember being able to buy a single piece of gum for a nickle. Yes, that meant if you saved up 5 cents you had a piece of gum... but those days are gone. Move on.
It will be intresting to read the reactions on this subject from Americans. Americans are after all paying for these expensive pennies with their taxes and if there is anything an American hates it is paying taxes. So, what excuses will those people come up with to keep cent/penny around? Nostalgia?
In a way this shows the failure of democracy. This kind of move should be left to wise men, not people who feel nostalgic for a by gone era when you got a shiny penny from your granddad to buy candy. Maybe if democracy wasn't secret, then those 55% could be made to pay for the costs of making the pennies directly out of their own pocket. Wonder how many would still be nostalgic then?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought lollies were illegal in Australia.
True it's not a gold standard, but it is some kind of standard that locks the dollar into some real value, rather than have some bureaucrats in Washington be able to devalue the dollar for their financial agendas.
Its rather embarrassing when you think about it.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Would someone please back up my claim that when I came back from Tenerife once, having decided to blow all my spending money, all that remained in my pocket was:
1 single coin - One half of one cent of one Euro.
Everyone I've spoken to who's familiar with the Euro says that it never existed. Wish I'd kept the damn thing now. It was so worthless but I kept it until I'd got back to the UK (because it was funny to say, when my parents asked, that I had come back with money - and show them the most pathetically small denomination of Euro coin I could ever have found) and eventually threw it away.
Tangible money interacts with the human animal differently than abstract mathematical concepts.
Coins are the most tangible money, paper is more abstract, especially U.S. paper money that is all basically the same except for the numbers on it. Checks and credit cards are even more abstract - so much so that many people really can't handle them properly.
Back in the day when a quarter would actually buy something worthwhile, if you tossed a quarter to somebody, they got a different visceral reaction than if they saw a penny coming. Paper, too, caused a different reaction because it was all inherently more valuable than coin. A coin more naturally "feels" like something you can instinctively trade or equate with other tangible objects of value. It takes many years of playing "The Price is Right" before most people get that same relationship with abstract prices, and again, some never really do.
I don't think that a penny should cost $0.01 to produce, but I do think that there is real value in tangible coins that paper and credit cards lack.
cash register software engineer to Mgmt:
"It's pretty brilliant. What it does is where there's a cash transaction, and the rounding are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a dollar, which it usually rounds off. What this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account."
Mgmt to Goverment:
"Um, I'm gonna need you go ahead and come in tomorrow and pass this law. So if you could be here around nine, that would be great."
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
I suspect 53 percent of respondents simply have difficulty adjusting to things being different.
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Way to drive home the stereotype that the only value for bitcoins is for anarchists and terrorists. Some of us would actually like to see a functional, non-fiat currency that doesn't raise the ire of governments such that they seek to shut it down.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
While fishing around in my pile of change a while back, I came across a quarter that didn't sound quite right. The sound of it clattering on the table seemed a little weird, and my ear picked up on it right away. On closer inspection I saw that it was stamped 1964. Some research revealed that the reason it sounded different was because it was actually 90% silver. 1964 was the last year they did that. The following year they switched to a nickel-copper-nickel sandwich construction still in use today (visible when you look at the edge). By 1964 one quarter used more than $0.25 worth of silver. Today the silver content of that quarter is a bit more than $30 (prices fluctuate, but they are presently very high). I gather that these older silver quarters are a favorite of hobby jewelers, because it is fun to make jewelry from money. And, as Make magazine tells us, sometimes it's cheaper to make something out of real money than it is to buy.
I'd pick up a penny on the ground just like I often pick up any other trash, not for the monetary value but because it's litter. Non-biodegradable liter at that.
PLASTIC!!!!!
USE PLASTIC!!!!!! Or find a way to metal coat plastic.
Hollow the coin out- like some countries do to use less metal.
There are lots of ways to lower the cost of making "useless" coins. If we even need them. I'd be fine with doing away with 1cent coins, 5cent coins, etc.
For those worried about rounding- it already happens? Your gallon of "Gas" is not $3.44 it is $3.4499 - and your total bill never comes to an even penny. Your sales tax rarely calculates out to an even penny. You've been rounding what you spend for years and didn't even know it. Rounding up and down for the 5cents will help you sometimes- hurt you other times. It'll even out fair overall though.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Along the history of the Roman Empire, the amount of gold in the Aureus coin consistently decreased as the need for more (cheap) money increased, to fund the military campaigns and buy peace from the barbarians. It could only last so long. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureus
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Yep, pennies go in the trash. Fuck those things.
We could just eliminate coin and paper currency all together. We can get by just fine with plastic, checks and other promissory type notes.
I don't think that a penny should cost $0.01 to produce, but I do think that there is real value in tangible coins that paper and credit cards lack.
Sure, I understand your point...but if your concern is holdings that won't wax and wane with the money markets, why not purchase commodities like gold or silver?
If the weight changes, it will only screw with the vending machines and parking meters. This of course will jack up the prices, as someone will incur the cost to modify the machines (the end users)! But hey, there will be more jobs created as a result.
www.moonnext.com
...from my purchase of *exactly* one gallon of gas.
When gas was in double digits it made sense to have a fractional cent. Now that's it's triple digits, why do we need 4 digits of precision to pump gas? I'm sure it can be shown that a gas pump cannot measure that accurately. It's always like $3.699. $3.70 is only .027% different.
Of course it's just fool the customer - most people will drive 5 miles to get $3.699 gas instead of $3.70 because "it's a penny cheaper!".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Get rid of the penny and the one dollar bill.
We save money on printing the dollar bill and make room in cash register for a one dollar coin.
And the 2 dollar bill.
Every time I travel to the US, return with a bunch little coins. I can't even trade then at the airport. You need a lot to get a dollar. Just round to the nearest dime.
We used to have half-penny coins (and others). They were done away with for the same reason the penny (and probably nickels and dimes, too) should be: they became essentially worthless.
But, since this process makes sense, it probably won't happen. This IS America, after all. We have a reputation to maintain.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
How is that more tellling? We've got an american hero in ben franklin who said that 'a penny saved is a penny earned," and many people believe in the superstition that finding a penny is good luck. Given these two things, it's not surprising or telling in the least that 76 percent of respondents would pick up a penny if they saw it on the ground.
Most of his supporters are still being paid using them.
*ducks*
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I get the point about coins being tangible. but the feeling of tangible can change. When I lived in Japan, at first holding a hand full'o' Yen didn't feel like real money. After several months, i returned home and the Pound no longer felt like real money; but I was still familiar with it. When I go back to japan the Yen seems like proper money. I've complete broken the more tangible link in my brain. Money for me = How many hours work Vs how much beer can I buy. If that stays constant then everything is cool and I don't have to panic :)
Seriously, we ditched 1c, 2c and even 5c here in NZ ages ago almost everyone pays with eftpos - direct bank account debit cards - anyway so actual physical money is more of an inconvenient throwback than anything else.
Every so often the US makes me think I'm living in the future, this is one of those times.
Because it currently costs the federal government 2.4 cents to make a penny and 11.2 cents for every nickel.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the government in this regard. At one point the US was on the gold standard. (That was after it got off the wampum standard and the tobacco standard.) At that time the $20 gold coin cost $20 to make, by definition. (Actually, just a little bit more because of seigniorage.) The dollar was defined as a certain weight of a certain purity of gold. The coin was merely the government's guarantee of the weight and purity. However, the government decided to finance part of its spending through inflation. Since you can't do that while on a gold standard (other than through new gold discoveries or processes) they had to do away with it.
The government likes inflation because 1) they get to spend it first, 2) they get to pay their debts with worth-less money, and 3) tax bracket creep allowed them to increase tax rates without voting for them. (This last one has since been eliminated by indexing tax brackets to inflation, but it was a major component for many years.) First they inflated the money supply, and the gold in the gold coins became worth more than the face value, and the gold coins had to go. They continued inflating and the silver in the dollar, half-dollar, quarter, and dimes became worth more than their face values, so the government had to find something worth less to make them out of. Now they have continued until the nickel and penny are worth more than their face values.
I, for one, think it's time for the government to stop financing their spending through inflation.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
...if your concern is holdings that won't wax and wane with the money markets, why not purchase commodities like gold or silver?
It's not really my concern, but, looking at the "value" of gold from 1975 to the present, I'd rather keep my savings in an imaginary construct like the U.S. dollar invested in a mix of index funds and bond issues. When that system collapses, everyone scrambles to prop it back up again, when the value of gold stagnates and declines in real terms for decades at a time, the world yawns.
If Ron Paul is right, we'll eventually be ditching the penny altogether once its completely worthless. In its place, there will be a new $100 gold coin, which will eventually carry the same value as today's penny.
There ain't very many pre-1983 pennies in circulation because collectors and metal investors cull them. Those are worth nearly 3 cents each. Some call copper the poor man's silver. It will be interesting to see whether the zinc pennies will be culled as zinc goes above $1/lb. What would they make the new ones out of? plastic?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Stop inflating our currency! Inflation is government produced and is effectively a hidden tax on all of us.
Gas prices in the US have been set to the TENTH of a cent and are rounded off now.
So what difference would currency to the nearest 10 cents mean? And if you pay by credit card it ISN'T rounded off.
Reminds me of an electronic fraud scheme where a hacker stole all the tenth's of cents left over from bank accounts.
Alternatively the US could do what places like Indonesia has done with virtually worthless small denominations. Shops give you sweets in your change. This would be the measure the powerful boiled sweet lobby would recommend.
I throw all my pennies in a coffee mug on my desk. When the mug fills up, I dump the contents into a bag and walk it down to a local bank which has free coin counting for the public (with no surcharges). Generally, I have enough to get a "dirty water hotdog" or two for lunch from the street corner vendor.
During my walk to the bank, I may end up passing a panhandler who can always be counted on to ask for money. As long as I don't see them holding a cigarette or cell phone (things they apparently can afford to buy), I might just give them the bag of pennies instead and point them to the bank.
This effect is called Gresham's law.
Well for the record I set my clock an hour and 45 minutes ahead so that I am on time! : )
But yes, $0.95 did seem lower because with 5% MA sales tax before they changed it it was still under a buck, so it was good for impulse sales. (Now that Taxachussetts changed it, it's back to being BS - you have to grab the penny from the Take-A-Penny tray to not bust open a second bill and get a handfull of crappy change.)
But in my opinion the real reason you can't eliminate pennies is that the chaos you'd cause in Accounting would far outstrip the "nicety" of not having pennies. Hell, Nickels are equally silly. Dimes are a close call. I stop my valuation at quarters, which are still good for laundry machines.
If suddenly there were no pennies the entire world would play the Office Space Game of "which way can I pocket the difference to my own benefit."
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The reason is that if there is change for a tenner (for example), then the tenner has to be rung through the till and the change (one penny) returned. If the price was a tenner, then the till receptionist could pocket the tenner and claim the goods must have been stolen.
This, though, only makes sense when the "$9.99" is the customer-with-tax price.
I've been having a disconnect lately with the price of gasoline. I will agonize over a $50 tech gadget purchase that I might make once every 3 months, searching for that last $5 discount, comparing competing products, etc. Then, I'll take a weekend trip and toss $85 of fuel in the vehicle, it's just.... wrong. I grew up in the '70s when travel by automobile was nearly free, the relevant cost was time more than money. Maybe 120mpg hybrids will bring those days back for awhile.
My point on the tangible is that people, as a big messy impossible to characterize group, do tend to accurately abstract the value of a (steady valued) coin you can hold more readily than they do numbers on a credit card slip, or coupons, or travel mile points.... In the U.S. we don't trade coins over $0.25 in value on any regular basis... I think we'd have better money management by people overall if there were coins up to $10 in regular circulation - you know, something you could actually pay a whole bar tab with.
It's a crime to deface or destroy currency, so how would you get your 2.4 cents worth of raw materials? (Assuming, of course, that the 2.4 cents that it costs to make a penny comes from raw materials, and not labour and production machinery upkeep, transportation, and the like.) If you're going to get into crime, I'm sure there are lots of ways of making $28,000.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Why stop at pennies and nickles? Thanks to Obama and Bush before him, along with generations of politicians who use the printing press to buy votes, *none* of our money is worth the paper it is printed on. None of it had a direct correlation with our productivity or our creation of wealth.
We certainly won't have enough of it to buy gas this Summer, because one group of voters was chosen over another with regards to energy policy, but at least prices will be five dollars plus, along with 9/10th of a cent. We've certainly rounded up after measuring prices based upon non-existent currency before.
In the mean time, we have guys who have made their fortunes trading curencies like they were actual products using their money to fund resentment and envy against those who earned their money through hard work and smart decisions - again, all about buying votes. The USA is becoming Venezuala very quickly.
Worrying about the manufacturing costs of small currency in this environment is like worrying about a dripping faucet when a tsunami warning has been issued. You may now return to sticking your heads in the sand, I'm sure the powers from both parties in Washington will continue sticking theirs up their arses.
I don't know about everyone else, but if pennies are not >= 2.5% copper, and >= 50% zinc then I will not waste my energy bending over to pick them up. Do we not have standards anymore?!
1) Get rid of pennies, nickels, and quarters.
2) Replace 50c coins with something nickel-sized. (dollar coins are already quarter-sized)
3) Switch to a deci-dollar based system (e.g. $0.1)
Voila, you have a coins of $0.1 (dime sized), $0.5 (nickel sized), $1.0 (quarter sized) where the coin size is proportional to value. And you just reduced the number of coins in half.
It seems to me that having pennies around costs much more than they are worth. All the metal and processing used to make them, the human resources needed to handle them, the equipment used to count and store them, etc. etc. If you want to deposite a lot of pennies to the bank, you need to roll them up (another cost), and all that extra time. Pennies get lost, millions of pennies burried in the dirt or in couches. Seems like a big waste to me.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
There has been historic debate upon this subject...
The nickel today is not what it was fifteen years ago. Do you know what this country needs today?A seven-cent nickel. Yessiree, we’ve been using the five-cent nickel in this country since 1492. Now that’s pretty near a hundred years’ daylight saving. Now, why not give the seven-cent nickel a chance? If that works out, next year we could have an eight-cent nickel. Think what that would mean. You could go to a newsstand, buy a three-cent newspaper and get the same nickel back again. One nickel carefully used would last a family a lifetime!
Groucho Marx (film: Animal Crackers)
Some many years ago, Britain adopted a decimilised currencey. It simplified things, yet there were hidden disadvantages: after the introduction of the new coinage (12 old pennies comprised a shilling, then became 5 New Pence) prices for goods were converted upward, and led to a one-off step in inflation. for example, something that sold for an old penny, coverted directly to 0.416666667 in New Pence would now be sold for a New half penny, which was 0.083333333 New pence increase - a small matter of 16% increase. If you were a scruffy schoolkid who dealt in exchange rates based on the 'Mars Bar' economic standard, things got tough!
I can barely GIVE pennies away, and they are worried about making them cheaper.
While I know they are "legal" currency and shops MUST take them, they often flat-out refuse to. It might be cheaper in the long run to just stop making them altogether and force these stores which refuse to take them to stop having prices where you NEED to pay with pennies. That way, they can't refuse to take them anymore.
You realize that it is a felony offense to do this? http://www.usmint.gov/consumer/18USC331.cfm
When I visited So-Cal last year, I had a few Canadian pennies mixed in with my US currency. Every time one (and only one) slipped in when I paid cash, the store rejected it. In Canada we just don't care if an American penny, nickel or even dime slips in.
It was all the more amusing because our dollar higher than the US at the time, so technically that penny was actually worth more.
that 3/4 of people would pick up a penny from the ground? I would pick up a piece of trash from the ground, but that doesn't mean I want trash.
Funny! UTF-8 solved all these problems a decade ago.
Let me test without the HTML entities... €
If € and € look the same, then it's a user error and not a slashdot one.
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Plastic! Actually, some countries are using plastic for the larger currency in a bill form because it is more durable and harder to forge. Besides, wouldn't it be fun to have translucent coins in different colors for the denomination? Of course, breaking a penny or nickel might take on a new meaning...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
Your memory is incorrect. I am sick of false fantasies of incredibly low gas prices in history. It never happened. There is this thing called inflation. Gas was not "almost free" in the 1970s. Adjusted to 2004 dollars, it varied between $1.73 and $2.28. The lowest adjusted price for gas EVER was $1.22 in 1998. That compares to the best adjusted price in the 1930s - $2.15 in 1931 - and the best adjusted price in the 1950s - $2.00 in 1952. In 2004 it had only risen to $1.89 from the 1998 low.
OK, the chart stops in 2004, and the current adjusted value is probably around $3.90, but somehow I don't think twice the price is the difference between $2 and $3.90 is "nearly free" compared to agonizingly high.
Ref: Historical Gas Prices, 1919–2004
I would NOT pick one up off the ground, they're worthless little pieces of trash. I throw pennies the hell away -- that's right, in the trash bin. Yeah, it costs me a few million times the counter-inflationary "benefit" I acheive, but the rest of you benefit for free, and I benefit by NOT HAVING FUCKING PENNIES CLUTTERING UP MY GODDAMN LIFE. You can thank me by telling your congressman to GET RID OF THE MOTHERFUCKING PENNIES -- if you don't, I'll assume you're a miserly, penny-pinching (literally) asshole.
I agree that pennies and nickels should be eliminated. (Also, $1 bills should be dropped, and $1 and $2 coins should be introduced that don't look or feel like quarters.)
However, taking your valuable time to sort out pennies so you can throw them away IS idiotic. All of the current US coins are too small valued to bother carrying around. I just throw every coin I get into a jar when I get home.
About once per year, I bring it into my credit union and dump it in their convenient coin sorting machine, pennies and all, and in seconds it spits out a receipt I can deposit like a check. This way, I save time, and I'm not wasting valuable metals or costing the taxpayers the money it takes to replace the useless coins.
before the euro the italian lira had a low nominal value . 1 euro= 1936.27 lire, 1 US£ = about 1400 lire. The smallest mint coin was the 50 lire one and all purchases were rounded to the nearest 50 lire, but older coins, down under 1 lira were still legal tender and minted until the Euro switchover, but they were almost made for collector sets, but sometimes they were still found in the wild, especially in LPG and CNG pumps or cheese sellers in open air markets.
http://coinflation.com/
Bad money drives out the good.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Sad that the federal gov't has debased US currency to the point that Zinc (in pennies) is too expensive. Perhaps instead of changing the metals in US coins, that the gov't should enact policies to stop the US dollar from becoming worthless. Using Cheaper metals won't matter if the dollar continues to devalue because in a few more years even the cheaper metals will become too expensive.
Bernanke said earlier this week that he was to devalue the dollar by 1/3 over then next five to six years. That means the even the cheaper metals will be too expensive to mint.
Could produce something, that is worth LESS than the cost to MANUFACTURE it!
Reading these comments, it's incredible how many of you actually use cash. I haven't touched cash in a decade. Charge the shit to a rewards card and pay it off each month. Wife gets to get some garbage out of a catalog every few months for what she perceives as free (cashes in rewards points). Pay all bills electronically. I write like one check a year, and that's for some service that won't take a credit card.
This makes budgeting and spending control a hell of a lot easier and I never deal with cash, pennies, etc. Privacy is not a concern, as I only purchase staple items and shit from the hydro store (we're thrifty).
I have a half gallon glass jar I have been filling with pennies since the 90s. It is almost full. I'm sure there are a few pre-1982 copper pennies in there. It is my money. I think the government should let me sell those pennies for copper.
The final SD thread, coming in our lifetimes, will be about the debate to get rid of hard currency altogether as most transactions will be electronic.
Given the way a number of my Republican friends reacted to the laws to get rid of incandescent light bulbs ( portable heaters ), I'm surprised there aren't TEA party rallies comparing President Obama to Hitler for this move along with discussions of how to prepare for the invasion of black UN helicopters.
A number of people outside of the United States have been mentioning that their countries got rid of their equivalent of the penny years ago.......and the world didn't come to an end.
Still......
I remember a number of years ago, there was a true story about a programmer who wrote some kind of banking software. He did something such that he got a fraction of a penny on every transaction that went through the bank, deposited into a secret account.
After a few years he was quite wealthy and the only reason he got caught was he couldn't suppress his desire to brag.
Lesson learned: even little amounts add up.
How would people feel if they were told that because of rounding up to a nickle, they could have had an extra $100, $10 etc at the end of the year, 5 years, etc?
How would they feel knowing that they made a "donation" to corporate America of several thousand dollars over the course of their life time, for which those companies gave them *nothing*?
In 1972, prices that mattered _to me_:
Can of soda from a vending machine: $0.25
Portable cassette recorder: $40
500 mile car trip (gas cost only) 25 gallons at $0.36/gallon -> $9
Yes, there has been inflation, but it was not unreasonable for an 8 year old to carry around a $10 bill in 1972... what would you think of an 8 year old carrying around $100 today?
It is the perfect coin for the economy we've been working towards! Come on Obama, make it so!
P.S. The U.S. and E.U. are in a head to head battle for who can print money the fastest, but I predict that China will win this race to the bottom. I have 2 beautifully designed paper Yuan notes, each worth 0.2 cents. Beat that Mr. Bernanke!
It wouldn't be the biggest stretch in the world for a lawyer to equate willfully disposing of currency in the garbage where it will be buried hundreds of feet below ground for tens of thousands of years as equivalent to willful destruction or mutilation.
Hell, if they can get OJ off for murder then this isn't so far fetched.
You haven't switched over to electronic or camera toll collection yet?!!!
savages...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
why bother with pennies
If you do financial math with floating point numbers, you need to step away from the keyboard and let professionals do the programming.
Sounds like those people learned to program from a school advertizing on the back of a matchbook. You need to watch out for that, or Richard Pryor will come to your office and smash your laser printer with a baseball bat.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not according to that. The law says that it is a crime if anyone "fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales or lightens" coins.
You're not doing it for purposes of fraud, and really -- you're not doing any of those things. You're throwing it in the bin. It's still the same goddamn penny, and hasn't been altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened in any way. It's just in the bin.
This is all while government is trying to pretend there is no inflation, while inflation has been rampant at 11-15% for the last 2 decades, which means that real rate of return on bonds and stocks is negative and it means that real GDP is shrinking all the time (and whatever goes into GDP is spending anyway), so the taxes as percentage of GDP are at historic high, and while Obama is yelling that "the rich aren't paying their fair share", Geithner says "It's good that the rich are paying 97% of all INCOME taxes and the bottom 97% only pay 3% of total income tax".
Yeah, "there is no inflation" and jobs are leaving because of "evil rich people", not because of government destroying the money. And wars are all about "freedom" and have nothing to do with the only real industry that US is still engaged in.
You can't handle the truth.
With a single pre-1965 silver dime you can buy a gallon of gas. Try doing it with a modern dime.
Of-course it took near 20 cents prior to 1965 to buy a gallon of gas AND you got more service for it - washing fluid check, oil check, wiping the windshield.
ALL THIS while the actual consumption in USA has been declining for a few years now. This is funny to see Keynesian charlatans squirm faced with this so called "paradox". Well, to them it is paradox, not to actual economists. A slump in consumption does not cause lowering of prices because production goes down even faster.
Of-course in US the real problem is inflation - all the money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar and dollar has lost its meaning in 1971 anyway, when US actually defaulted on its debts.
But your calculation is incorrect, to that old (pre 1965) person the value of a dollar fell over 40 times.
You can't handle the truth.
Indeed, Bitcoins aren't as far off other currencies as its proponents think. Bitcoins represent an amount of work done within the Bitcoin network (given that they are "minted" that way), while fiat currency essentially represents an amount of labor done to acquire it. You sell your labor to get money--with Bitcoin, you are "selling" your computer's labor. (A gross oversimplification, but I think it's interesting.)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
If suddenly there were no pennies the entire world would play the Office Space Game of "which way can I pocket the difference to my own benefit."
In Finland we don't have the 1 and 2 cent coins in use. (The made some, basically for collectors, when we started to use Euros though.)
If you pay by card (credit or debit), the price will be the sum of the price tags of the products you've collected (and the amount of taxes can be seen on the receipt), if you pay in cash, the sum will be rounded to the nearest .05. There's really nothing to pocket.
It is what it is.
I like how you both deposit them for cash and call them useless.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What I see on the sticker is what I pay.
Items with tax - mainly fuel, cigarettes and alcoholic beverages - are priced including tax, same as Oregon.
We should use this as an opportunity.
Forget going backed to the gold standard for money, we should have all our money backed by pennies, with them being twice the cost of their face value, we'd double the value of everyone's money overnight!!!
What should happen, instead of these insignificant tweaks, is to eliminate making pennies altogether, as well as paper $1 bills. It's ridiculous to continue the waste associated with create paper $1 notes, that have such sort lifespans. They're only worth about 4 cents compared to the value of the dollar when the Federal Reserve was created. Make $1 coins instead. When all the paper runs out, people will have no choice but to use the coins, and save the treasury (and the taxpayer) about $300 million a year.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I remember in high school chemistry we took a penny and filed off one edge to get to the zinc. We then submerged the penny in HCL so we ended up with a hollow penny.
I wonder if that experiment would still work with the new pennys/nickles.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
So... let me get this strait, in order to save $100 million our government can either:
A. Build 1 less tank/fighter jet
B. The president could stop using his own private Jet
C. We could delay invading Syria / Iran (whomever's next) by about 4hrs
D. Completely overturn the way our currency has functioned for over 200 years.
and we're choosing D?
I'm not from the USA, so I find it bemusing how everything your Federal government does gets labeled "Obama's". Do you really think the President sits there in the Oval Office, micromanaging every single aspect of the Federal government's operations? You even keep his label on things that might have started with him, but ended up far away e.g. "Obamacare" is a long way away from the "single payer" reforms he wanted: the bill that passed Congress was seriously compromised by partisan interests, and he's getting blamed for the effects of changes he had nothing to do with and fought against unsuccessfully.
From outside the USA, you have to wonder why anyone wants the job in the first place: you need to be a starry-eyed idealist, who's seen too many episodes of "The West Wing", or a raving theocrat who wants to overturn the Bill of Rights, to think you'll get anything done in 4-year timeslots ...
(this is not a
I meant they are useless to carry around. When was the last time you dug coins out of your pocket to pay for anything? Even vending most vending machine purchases are simpler to do with the bill reader.
Of course, they could choose to make coins useful again if they updated the US currency as I suggested so the values correspond with historic usage (i.e., you should be able to buy a beer with one or two coins, and the smallest coin should be able to buy at least one of *something*).
So 15 sec ago.. They stopped pressing these months back, but thanks for playing!
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
Actually dimes are the least useful of the common change denominations.
5 pennies to a nickel
5 nickels to a quarter
4 quarters to a dollar.
Just eliminate the dime all together. That should save more than making pennies and nickels cheaper.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
In 2003/2004 in Georgia, USA....I was paying $.89/gallon for my gas.
Salaries have been largely stagnant since then...so as a percent of my pay, it was much much less.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
When I have to have a whole fucking fist full of nickles, dimes, and quarters just to buy a $1.50 coke and a $1.00 snack from the vending machines at work, and they don't even take pennies at all....I know something is wrong with our currency.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Pennies have more value as projectiles than they do as currency.
I always leave my pennies at the register when I get them.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
as are 2 & 5.
Why even bother producing coins that are worth more as a material than as a coin?
Well it used to be the material that mattered. You were exchanging N grams of copper, or silver or gold. The British pound used to be a unit of weight of silver. Course the government needs to inflate away it's overspending, renege on it's debts, spend on political promises, make war etc so they changed the meaning of the word so they can reduce the value you receive to effectively nothing.
In 1964 gas for your car cost around 30c per gallon. 3 silver dimes. Today it costs about 3-4 dollars, a ten fold increase in the dollar price and about the melt value of ~2 silver dimes (cheaper production).
I'll leave it to you figure out who the sucker is.
Deleted
It's just what happens with inflation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
There's more than one version of the gold standard.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Instead, can we just stop purposely devaluing our currency, so that the value of the "money" is higher than the cost to manufacture the token?
You can argue that even for pennies. Money is usually calculated to 4 decimal places. Going up to the dime level just means shifting everything so that it's only calculated to 3 decimal places.
Might as well make the dime the new penny. If the cost of manufacturing the penny and the nickle are more than the face value of the coin, then there's a problem. At that point, you might as well treat it like a metal-backed currency.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
... only goes to show how fucked up our economy is.
Be seeing you...
So for all those that said Obama has done nothing while in office I say [sarcasm]IN YOUR FACE.[/sarcasm]
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You're talking about a development from a time when sales tax didn't exist (or wasn't collected). There was a reason, but that is not the reason now.
Now, it is well-accepted that the "primacy effect" means that a $5.99 price will be mentally converted to "$5" and seen as cheaper. Most of this seems to be philosophical arguments rather than good hard science, but I'll leave that.
Although networkBoy mentions alternate reasons, these are usually store-specific, and still keep the price within a few pennies of the next dollar up. Walmart typically ends prices in .88 or .87 for the same reason, IIRC. The psychology there is two-fold. One, a $19.99 item is cheap at the Walmart price of $19.88. Two, for customers who don't really think about it, it is very easy to make people think $4.88 is better than $3.99 because it was "4 dollars or so" and Walmart is 11 cents less. There is an entire game show, "The Price Is Right", based on the idea that people don't know how much normal products typically cost (whevever they survey the prices, which tyically is not where the contestant lives).
They are still counting on getting as close to the next dollar without going over, no matter the reasons, due to the business schools teaching primacy.
Why shouldn't our smaller units of currency be converted to paper to reflect this situation and keep costs down
It isn't clear that paper money is cheaper overall than coins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote#Advantages_and_disadvantages
But, its telling if the smaller denominations cannot be produced effectively because the base metals are to expensive. Worse yet is the raw manufacturing cost is almost 1/2...
On the positive side, no one will counterfeit something that is worth less than the materials used to make it.
If you really want valuable pennies, pass a law that says the official tender of the United States is changing to the "New Dollar" (or, to get the GOP on side, "the Reagan") and that the Federal Reserve will exchange 1 US dollar for a 1/100 of a Reagan.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I live in NZ, a country where tipping is very seldom done. The service is generally very bad because there is no incentive to do better. I am always happy to return to the US and dine where I am treated better.
And on the coinage topic: NZ dropped the 1-cent coin maybe 12 years ago, and the 5-cent coin was dropped in 2006. Prices are NOT written in multiples of 10 cents. They are written as 4.99 or 12.34, or whatever. Tax is not an issue, although every price includes a national tax. Electronic transactions (credit or debit card) are charged the exact price. Rounding happens only when one pays cash, and then on the total amount, not each individual item. There are 2 or 3 approved rounding methods, and the store must publicly post which method they use.
It all just works.
there is real value in tangible coins that paper and credit cards lack
Sure but that value is NEGATIVE, or at the very least, less than the face-value of the coinage.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Aren't they more of a pyramid scheme?
The early adopters get a vast advantage over the new arrivals, but only so long as there's a constant stream of new arrivals to hold up the pyramid.
The shiny interesting tech stuff is just a front to bring in the right sort of marks.
the gold bugs are out in force...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Better yet round to the nearest dime on purchases. But all we really need is quarters.
Doesn't even need to be a federal mandate. Simply stop producing them and if retailers can't get them they will be forced to round. The amount of time wasted on counting pennies is shocking.
We should be able to get along fine on dimes and quarters.
So, we go back to the Gold Standard. Rich families like the Waltons start taking large percentages of their annual profits and using them to buy gold. Each and every year.
This distorts the value of your backed currency as it drives up their price of gold - and the value of the Richie Rich's stockpiles. Add that on top of already grotesque income disparity - the U.S. is worse than Egypt - and the rich will literally get richer as the poor get poorer.
Hey maybe they should subcontract their mint operations to us.. It only costs 1.8 Cents to make a penny in Canada..[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(Canadian_coin)] surely the Americans are doing something wrong if it cost them 2.4 cents..Anyways, seems theres a move afoot to make all of our coins out of steel (unknown source, likely the nightly news though).. Or, y'all doun south could do the "Fort Knox" thing and make em all out of gold painted wood...
In 2003/2004 in Georgia, USA....I was paying $.89/gallon for my gas.
And that's about what I paid in NJ in 1994 - I seem to recall .81 or .83 at some point. About a buck five in 2004 dollars.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's something a lot of the "eliminate the nickel" crowd seems to miss. You can't just eliminate the nickel because then the dime and quarter aren't compatible with each other. You can't make a quarter out of dimes alone, you need a nickel too (or 5 pennies I suppose).
I didn't see it in that list, but I have to ask...what the hell is utter in that context? How can you utter money?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?