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Should the US Change Metal Coins? (networkworld.com)
coondoggie writes: It may be time for the United States to rethink how the smallest parts of its monetary system — the penny, nickel and dime – are made. According to a report this week from watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office, since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen so much that the total production unit costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value resulting in financial losses to the U.S. Mint.
We got rid of the penny here in Canada. It was no big deal. I've hardly noticed the difference.
More dollar coins and add 2 dollar coins with cutting the 1 and 2 bills.
The penny and the nickel are money-losers, and not worth anyone's time. Neither is the dime - half-penny was equivalent to $0.20 today when we ditched it - but it makes a good starting point. However, if we keep the dime, we should dump the quarter, since you can't "break" a quarter into dimes
So the new coins should be $.10, $.20, and $.50, so the math is the same as with bills (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100). We can put Lincoln on the new $.20 and Jefferson on the new $.50. The coins should increase in size and/or thickness compared to dimes, for logical handling. Give them all reeded (grooved) edges - some day we will actually replace $1 and $2 bills with smooth-edge coins.
should stop debasing the currency and this wouldn't be a problem. duh.
Why isn't this option ever mentioned???
we're off the gold system, where metal coins were a store of value, linked to the market price of the metal in the coin. They're just representations of value, like glass beads or deer vertebras. it doesn't really matter how expensive they are, that doesn't affect their value. I'm not going to shed tears, considering all the ways that the US gov currently wastes money. Did you know that Donald J Trump has a full secret service retinue, bought and paid for by the taxpayers?
There are various copper and zinc related interests who lobby against changing this.
Nobody would actually miss the penny, though, I think, but enough lobbyists would make a fuss that it hasn't proven worth it yet.
Kill the penny.
Kill the Nickel.
Keep the dime - the smallest coin will now have the smallest value.
Kill the quarter
Create a new $0.50 piece a bit bigger than a dime, maybe a bit smaller than a penny.
Create a new $1.00 piece about the size of a nickel, maybe slightly larger.
Create a new $5.00 piece about the size of a quarter.
To avoid confusion between new/old, change something mechanical - put a hole through the middle, or make them all octagonal or decagonal.
If you're worried about cost, make the dime and half out of Aluminum. We've given up the concept of any actual value in our currency, so it's time to give up the artificial weight that made them feel like silver.
Don't try to differentiate them by color. As the Sacajawea dollar taught us, after a few years in grubby fingers and rattling around in pockets, all coins start to have the same surface color.
We end up with rationally sized coins, getting bigger as the value gets bigger. We get rid of the small valued paper money, which is also expensive to print/replace.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The penny should be made from aluminum like the yen is in Japan.
What do you even use a penny for? I'm asking this as a serious question.
Last time I was in the USA, I ended up with a pocketful of pennies that were pretty much useless. Who uses a few pennies to make up the price when paying for something, as opposed to pulling out a couple of bills instead and getting some change.
Even the nickel is debatable if it's worth keeping or not.
More and more transactions are done electronically these days - so you can keep your $x.99 pricing if you want, and if it's an electronic payment, you get charged the exact amount.
If you were to get rid of pennies, then when paying in cash the price would be rounded to the nearest 5c, not on each individual item, but on the total sale. 1c & 2c will always get rounded down. 3c usually gets rounded down (so, is to the benefit of the buyer). 4c and 5c gets rounded up. If you're getting put out at the total price for something being rounded up and costing 2c more than shown on the bill, you've got bigger problems than this.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Gee, it was my understanding that it has cost more to make a penny than it was worth for several decades - not just since 2006. Mind you, the new pennies (since 2011) have less copper than they used to (see http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/12/15/just-how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-penny/ ) ... but then again, when was the last time you saw a penny gumball machine anyway?
We don't need pennies or nickles. Dimes are pretty marginal. Just round all prices to the nearest quarter and be done with it.
ObCorruptionTheory: Blanks for pennies and nickles are only made by one company, Jarden Zinc Products. There's a story that this company lobbied hard enough to keep the penny around. Looking at their web site, they have enough other irons in the fire that they'd get by if they had to.
And in more context, the US Mint uses something like 23,000 tonnes of zinc on pennies each year, compared to worldwide zinc production of 11 million tonnes. That means pennies use something like 0.2% of the zinc produced each year.
They've been working this problem longer than since 2006! The coins have been having their metallic contents changed for some time now (at least since the Reagan administration) in order to try to keep their production costs in line with their value. The penny is mostly made of zinc and not copper, for instance. The problem is keeping their weights the same as we have so many coin operated devices still in use that judge denominations by not only size but weight; that's why Canadian coins come out the return if you try to use them in the U.S., same size, different weight. Until we get rid of all of those mechanical devices (it's coming along for things like soda and candy vending machines and parking meters) the coins are going to have to stay. Not much uses pennies, though, so that will be the first to go. Probably in the next decade.
If smaller denominations are only useful for giving to the homeless then stop minting them!
Less wealthy nations such as Timor Leste and El Salvador use the US Dollar as their currency. Withdraw them from circulation in the US and ship a containerful elsewhere.
At the beginning of the 20th century, we had cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars. Then we had quarter-eagles ($2.50), half-eagles ($5), eagles ($10), and double eagles ($20). The purchasing power of a dollar then was about 30 times what it is today.
So: ditch the cent and nickel. Keep the dime, half and dollar coins (making the half less bulky, please!), and bring back coins for $2.50, $5, $10, and $20. The dime will still be worth less than the 1900 cent, but this way we keep the nominal "dollar", we get coins with reasonable purchasing power, and we ditch the time- and resource-wasting one-cent and five-cent denominations.
Interestingly, the dollar's purchasing power is about one-tenth what it was in 1949. So the coins I propose above would roughly correspond to the value of a dent, nickel, dime, quarter, half, dollar, and two-dollar bill in 1949, a time when people seemed quite happy with our coinage system.
Here's an easy way to make money with Canadian pennies.
1) Go to a vending machine
2) Put in $1 in pennies
3) Immediately press the change button
4) Take the US coins and run before the Secret Service catch you
Do that two million times and you're a millionaire!
lucm, indeed.
I am not sure why we still have pennies. They are annoying and useless, and costing the tax payers money just keeping it in circulation. Keeping pennies make about as much sense as bringing back the half cent. tbh, I think John Oliver subbed it up pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
On the other hand... Copper prices is shrinking... http://www.thestreet.com/story...
First ditch the small coins and then get rid of $1 notes and replace with a coin and add a $2 coin.
Next swap over to plastic notes instead of paper notes. The plastic notes last much much longer and are much more difficult to forge.
Make nickels out of plastic, dimes out of soft felt, and quarters out of bone.
The real slippery slope is the whole concept of cash. There may come a day when you can't buy a stick of gum without there being a record of it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Few people need much of what a free society offers. Be careful of what you ask for, there is always someone who thinks they know what you need, and would be happy to limit you to that.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Interestingly, the dollar's purchasing power is about one-tenth what it was in 1949.
A 1949 dime, made of silver is still worth about a dollar...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Pshffft. I suppose you think money should be made in China, like all the other plastic crap.
Oh, wait...
Never mind.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There are lots of people who have large stockpiles of small coins they are hoarding. If people would return the coins, the mint could stop making as many.
The left-wing needs to come up with a bunch of programs and agencies they would cut and improve by doing things differently to propose to the public. Really balance the budget, and a lot of things will have to change or not happen.
We got rid of the penny here in Canada. It was no big deal. I've hardly noticed the difference.
Well, Australia got rid of their 1c & 2c coins in 1992. We don't miss them.... but be prepared for old people to whine about having to round up/ down for cash sales.
46137
Our currency only has fiat value, so replacing the coins with base(r) metals is sensible. A program can be enacted by the govt. to buy up all of the existing coinage. Even poor immigrants don't care about pennies, so they should be eliminated. Nickels aren't in much better shape. Dimes are the smallest unit people care about, yet only slightly given how often I find them lying around unmolested. Quarters are the only way to pay in certain coin-op machines (e.g. laundromat washing machines), so they have value there.
Therefore, we should retain the quarter for legacy machine purposes, and make new $1 coins in addition. Two coin denominations, that's it, keeps it simple. Round the retail sales values down to the nearest quarter dollar; merchants have enough overhead with credit/debit card transaction fees that 12 cents average isn't that bad. The big question is what size the new coin should be, larger than the quarter makes sense yet it should be trivially distinguishable from the quarter's size, while not being so large as to be bulky in the pocket.
In practice, I know what will happen: absolutely nothing. The govt. wants to make cash increasingly difficult to use to encourage usage of more-traceable forms of payment. They won't outright ban the $50 and $100 bills, but will pretend to ignore the problem instead. When people don't pay with cash, inflation is easier to obscure, as well.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's a bit ironic to see this story when copper just fell below $2/lb. Old copper pennies are still worth more than face, but the current clad pennies are worth less than face again. We have a bear market in commodities the past few years to thank for this. I seem to recall that nickels had something like $0.07 of metal in them a few years ago, and now it's about $0.027 according to coinflation.com.
Of course it's good to think about this, because it's only a matter of time before commodities go up in price again, and it becomes a real problem. Again. We won't think about it though. There are too man other bigger problems.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A government's wet dream.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
The headline seems arbitrary because everything printed results in financial loss. It isn't like mints sell the currency they produce to pay for cost of production. A mint might save millions a year by altering the composition of 20 dollar bills even if production cost represented a miniscule fraction of given value.
My opinion a few tens of millions of dollars saved is literally pocket change next to scary multi-billion dollar estimates for coin machine modifications we all end up paying for. Paying a little more for people to extract more expensive materials from the ground seems ultimately more useful than paying people a heck of a lot more on the dead end job of reconfiguring coin machines.
I've always thought Japan got it right with their aluminum 1 Yen coin. Japan's 1 Yen coin (current face value of 0.85 US cents) has a much lower metal cost than our copper or copper clad zinc penny. Copper is currently $2/lb vs $0.66/lb for aluminum. Aluminum has a density of 1/3.32 that of copper so at today's metal prices an aluminum penny would cost 1/10th that of a solid copper penny and a few years ago it cost 1/40 that of a solid copper penny. Considering today's copper clad zinc penny aluminum density is roughly 1/3 that of zinc which at the moment has roughly the same cost/lb as aluminum so an aluminum penny would cost about 1/3 that of today's copper/zinc penny. Besides the much lower metal cost the light mass means that the 1 Yen coin floats on water.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I live in a country where the equivalent small change came in denominations of 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 in the 1960s. The metal used was cupro-nickel at that time.
Everything 25 and under has now been demonitised (since they weren't worth much any longer and weren't in demand), larger denominations (equivalent to 100, 200, 500, 1000) have been introduced, and metal usage has shifted first to aluminium and now stainless steel.
I thought that'd be just plain common sense, no matter where you live.
And what about the financial gain when they print a $100?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
I thought coins were supposed to cost more than their face value. Solves the counterfeiting problem.
Throughout history have significantly exceeded their face value to produce.
This is not actually a loss though - since the value of a coin is not the value on it's face - that's merely it's value to one individual. It's value to the economy = it's face value * however many trades it will be used for.
That gives a much higher margin for coins to still be made without a loss.
This sounds like typical republican/libertarian/austrian oversimplification of the issue leading to utterly false conclusions.
A more likely scenario is simply that, as small denomination coins have been used less and less the second part of the equation has shrunk enough that now production costs exceed the actual economic value of the coin.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Hi folks,
I'm a professional metals trader, and the initial claim ("since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen") is simply not true.
Here is a table for Copper, Nickel and Zinc (the 3 main metals used in minting coins) average yearly price, based on the official prices from London Metals Exchange (www.lme.com) which is the world reference for metals price:
Copper (in US$/MTon)
2006 -> 6955
2015 -> 5501
reduction by more than 20%
Nickel (in US$/MTon)
2006 -> 24254
2015 -> 11834
reduction by more than 50%
Zinc (in US$/MTon)
2006 -> 3275
2015 -> 1932
reduction by more than 40%
So, if those coins cost more to produce than their face value, it is not due to metals price, but to some other factor (probably a general inefficiency of the minting system in itself). This does not change the general consideration about dismissing small coins because they are simply useless, but the reason for it is not the price of metals.
The problem is that in the US they don't include sales tax into advertised prices - sell so0mething for "$2.50" you still need pennies because of sales tax.
Evereywhere else I've been to on the planet sales tax is included into advertised prices (often by law), but the US doesn't - change that and you wont need as many pennies
Just replace the 1 cent coin was replaced with a 99 cent coin. Then it's worth as much as the metal and it replaces 99.99% of the need for having a 1 cent coin in the first place. ;)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I throw my loose change into a coffee can every night, and when the can is full, I dump it in a machine that gives me an Amazon gift "card" (just a paper receipt with a unique code printed on it). I do this because my bank no longer accepts loose change, and because the machine charges almost 10% to take the value as currency.
It works out to a couple of hundred dollars a year, and it pays for all of my Amazon purchases. In fact, I just purchased the 16GB upgrade in this laptop with "free" Amazon gift cards.
If they get rid of this "worthless" small change, I won't end up with the Amazon credit, and I probably won't buy as much stuff from them.
Deflate the value of American currency by a factor of 100. Problem solved.
Not only would it solve the issue with low-denomination coins, it would make the entire spectrum of currency much more useful.
Think of it: If you had to pay for something expensive in cash, you wouldn't need a humungous wad of $100 bills. And the penny would be equivalent purchasing power to $1 now. You could go out for a walk with a few quarters in your pocket knowing that was all you needed to get lunch somewhere.
That is how currency was supposed to be anyhow!
...while you are at it. Coins without numbers are lame.
.. make money?
I'm curious why the face value being worth less than the face value is an issue. Doesn't the US Mint still own the metals? Doesn't it get used more than once? Can't they melt it down and make more pennies? Japan still makes a 1 yen coin, and doesn't have these issues. Maybe it's time to switch out copper for a less valuable metal.
How many times is a penny spent before it's melted down? Thousands? Millions? And making that into a new penny is cheaper, since 99% of the material is already there. So that penny lasts Millions or even billions of times.
It has its value used a billion times and costs more than a penny. OBVIOUSLY a 99.9997% profit isn't worth it because you wanted better than 99.9999% profit off the manufacture of the penny.
What a retarded argument.
By our Jewish 'masters'...
97% of the money in existence is 'bank money', which only exists on computers, and was created out of nothing by banks, when they made loans to people. Hence 97% of the money in existence is DEBT, and owed to banks. Hence banks OWN 97% of everything in the world, without the public having given them permission to do so. Don't believe me, look it up for yourself.
A government's wet dream.
The coins only have to be big enough to hold the tracking chip within them.
not even that... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
Though inflation lifted the absolute value, their actual sellable value is the same, so the claim that it's been the same since the 60's is spurious. What you get to spend hasn't changed as much as you think. The *prices* of things has gone up, but what you get to spend hasn't by as much, and that's important: pennies become important when your spending money gets tight.
Think of this: if you get rid of the penny, will the 99c prices go do 95c for the same product?
Of course something that costs $99,999.99 rounding up to $100,000.00 won't make much difference, but rounding from 99c to £1 is a 1% inflation.
...costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value resulting in financial losses to the U.S. Mint.
All coins result in a financial loss. They're not selling them as a product. They only act as a temporary placeholder for financial resources until they're lost/damaged/replaced.
You can mention that to your favorite conspiracy nutter who's worried about stores keeping the round up to 5 cents. Along with all those daylight saving hours, where do those go? I actually knew someone who couldn't figure that one out.
This comes up from time to time. The smaller coins are produced at a loss but overall the US Mint makes a profit and IIRC the money is put into the US' General Fund. https://www.usmint.gov/downloads/about/annual_report/2014AnnualReport.pdf
This comes up from time to time. The smaller coins are produced at a loss but overall the US Mint makes a profit and IIRC the money is put into the US' General Fund. https://www.usmint.gov/downloa...
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
As others have pointed out, this initiative to end the penny isn't new. One of the first debates I ever watched on C-SPAN, at least 35 years ago, was a debate about ending the penny. The rhetoric was thick. And stupid.
It no longer matters to me one way or the other. I almost never use cash. The ashtray in my car used to be filled with [sticky] pennies. Now its filled with something less identifiable. End it. Keep it. It makes no difference to a debit card.
No doubt the Penny is a liability now. You cannot make it for less then its value. Its costing the US a pretty Penny as they say. Anyone who argues against dropping the Penny is doing so only for prosperity sake. Because the Penny won't save you money on products or make them cost more. Not when the Penny is a negative cost to make. I am just amazed at the no brainer decisions our government could make to save a bit of money and they do not do it. Personally I would go as far as eliminating other coin such as the Nickel and maybe even the Dime. I would even think its time to consider dropping all physical money to save. But most definitely start with the obvious.
Let's just adopt caps as the standard currency and be done with it.
The lifecycle cost is very low since the darn thing is reusable numerous times. The production cost is a cost of capital for a transactional value. Plastic and virtual payment methods have substantially reduced the demand for coins but the value of a currency form of payment is not identifiable by expenses and costs. The cost per use is quite low indeed.
Bring back the $1000 bill. Introduce the $10,000 bill.
You know what? The vast majority of Norwegians can be tracked in real time by their card purchases.
What an efficient cage.
The penny seems pretty useless, frankly, and I speak as someone who's grown up using them for 50+ years.
I don't think it would be a bad thing to get rid of pennies, but no doubt some groups would manage to link it to communism, socialism, moral decay, the decline of 'Murica, and a host of other imagined sinister "problems" or conspiracies. I can almost hear the outraged cries and fear-mongering now.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Either the grocery store pays by rounding the final price down, or the customer pays when it gets rounded up. Or is it going to alternate? Even days, rounds to the customer favor, odd days it rounds against?
Penny - Aluminum (similar to Japanese yen coin?)
Nickel - Zinc
Dime - Keep
Quarter - Keep
50 cent piece - Ditch
$1 Coin - Keep
$5 Coin - Create and Ditch the $5 Bill
$10 Coin - Create and Ditch the $10 Bill
$25 Coin - Create and Ditch the $20 Bill
$50 Bill - Ditch
$100 Bill - Keep
A soldier is somebody who is willing to die to protect somebody else's rights
That's cute and politically correct, but I've known more than a few military people in my life, and I can guarantee you that most don't join with a vision of protecting others. Some join because they admire the military culture, some because they see an outlet for aggression, some because they're enthralled by the hierarchy of power and want to climb that ladder, but most join because they simply need a job and a path in life.
The reason I know they don't join with an honest desire to protect others is the vicious attitude they typically display towards any challenge to that very idea. (This is all from passive observation -- I know better than to raise the issue.) Here's what I mean. A man with an honest desire to protect others would simply do it, without insisting that others acknowledge it (especially when those others are already forced to support the military), and certainly without displaying aggression towards those who don't. He would let his actions do the talking. The fact that they DO display aggression towards "infidelity" implies that aggression and ego is a priority for them, taking precedence over logic, persuasion, and actual achievement. But if aggression and ego is a priority, then how can altruism ALSO be a priority? There is a type mismatch here, and I think the conclusion is obvious, if not politically correct.
To be fair, I'm sure there are some who did join out of an honest desire to protect others. But in my experience, those types are few and far between.
Instead of getting rid of the small coins, because it costs so much more to make them than what they are worth. . . . . . why not quit printing so many dollars out of thin air?
Constantly printing new money (or creating new money in accounts electronically) is the real problem. Printing more and more money when there is No actual increase in wealth causes the value of the dollar to go down. As the value of the dollar goes down, the value of the coins goes down too because their value is defined by the dollar. After a while, it becomes a need to eliminate the coins because there is a risk people might melt them down. Sure, there is a point where they have more intrinsic value than the money they represent. That is why in the 60's, they got rid of the silver in coins (I remember Nixon saying the new coins were just as good and worth just as much as the silver ones!). Later, in the 80's, they got rid of the copper in pennies. These people who inflate our currency and cause the dollar to be worth less and less can't have people carrying around money in their pockets that doesn't decrease in value.
Go ahead and rationalize that coins are no longer convenient. Drink the Kool-Aid. Drink Deep. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Just remember that once there is nothing in circulation that has any real value. . . dropping the value of the dollar (or any currency) really fast is not a problem.
If making pennies that are worth more than a penny loses money for the mint, then certainly printing $1000 bills which are only worth (as paper) pennies themselves, the mint ought to have near infinite wealth.
The nickel today is not what it was fifteen years ago. Do you know what this country needs today? A seven cent nickel. Yes siree, we've been using the five-cent nickel in this country since 1492. Now that's pretty near 100 years daylight saving. Now why not give the seven cent nickel a chance? If that works out, next year we can 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 life-time.
- Mike
Metal prices are a all time lows.
Copper is below 2 bucks a poun, a six year low.
Other metals like Ni are also down like oil and other commodities.
This is just part of the relentless drive to eliminate case, so the government can track and control every aspect of your economic life.
Cash including coins are fast, secure, and anonymous.
But how many care about money spent by government? Almost no one cares, looking at how many people care about national debt.
How would I then be able to give my $.02??
If we're really hung up on the relatively minor governmental expense of having a coin whose face value is less than the value of its constituents, then we already have a tested solution for this "problem". Make the pennies out of steel, like we did in WWII. A quick web search indicates that zinc is currently a little more than 1500 dollars per metric ton, while steel is 170 dollars per metric tonne. That should solve the problem for a while.
Everyone knows that the US penny is no longer worth anything. There's no national shame in it, it's simply a byproduct of macroeconomics over time, just like the equivalent of every other major currency is longer worth anything. Let it die. The penny dish on store cashier counters can go away. The clerks at a lot of places I buy things already ignore pennies when making change: if they owe me $.73 in change they give me three quarters.
And while we're at it, the US nickel isn't worth much of anything either. Let it die too.
Getting rid of both of them at the same time would solve the math-is-hard problem involved in rounding to nearest five-cents: rounding everything to the nearest tenth of a dollar is much easier for people to do in their base-10 heads: less than .05 = .00, .05 or more = .10.
And also while we're at it, every other major currency on the planet has already discontinued their equivalent of the $1 bill, replacing then with a coin. It's time.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Canada has one of the best physical currency systems I've seen. No frigging pennies, transactions rounded to the nearest 5 cents. Means at *worst* you'll have a few pieces of useful silver jangling in your pocket vs a pile of worthless pennies.
Dollar coins are actually useful in Canada. You can put dollar coins in meters, snack and soda machines, etc. vs trying to fold and iron a mangled paper bill to appease the finicky reader. You can actually USE dollar coins there to buy things without getting looked at like a asshole. You can walk into a bar and slap some coins down and buy a beer.
The U.S. would do well if they could actually implement usage of $1 coins in automated kiosks. Very few people use dollar coins because you can't do anything with them here. Machines won't take them. Hell, people often won't take them, legal tender or not, because they aren't familiar with them and think they're getting a wooden nickel or something. If you could use them in machines, more people would use them, more people would see them and realize that they are legit, and then they could be used for lots of small transactions.
And, as a an aside, plastic currency is awesome. Run your wallet through the washer accidentally, or fall out of the kayak on your trip? No problem. In the U.S., you can hold a legally acceptable but worn paper $5 in your hand and be unable to purchase anything from an automated kiosk because somebody ran it through the washer at some point and the reader can't make it out. I'd imagine it is harder to counterfit a plastic bill as well.
This isn't rocket surgery. For a society based on the success of commerce I don't understand why the U.S. makes small transactions so awkward.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
What people on both sides don't understand is the first part. What this means is that INSTEAD of having a standing Army which the colonists lived in fear of and was required to enforce tyranny, it was necessary to have a well regulated (armed and trained) militia. If you want to be free and secure this is the only option. If you have a standing Army you will be secure but not free. If the the citizens well armed and trained you won't have security.
The best example is the modern world is Switzerland. Everyone is well trained and armed. But the professional full timers in the army are only about 5% while the rest are the militia.
This view is backed up by the Powers of Congress which make a difference between the Navy (which was intended to be permanent) and the Army (which was only funded for 2 years at a time and only called up from the militia when needed).
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The whole mechanism behind crypto currencies is about purposefully broadcasting every single transaction to the blockchain - a virtual global ledger that every member of the network has a local copy of.
If you're scarred of the government tracking you, cryptocurrencies are an even worse idea, because any entity with powerful enough big-data-analysis capabilities could simply dig through the blockchain.
On the other hand, if you're interested in a currency than no one in particular can control, that the main reason for using it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It is to defend ourselves against the government.
Then don't put yourself in a situation where the government has that much power to begin with.
There's this thing called "direct democracy". You should research a bit about this.
If the general population has a final on anything and everything that the government does, then government's power a quite limited.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
our founding fathers when they warned us to never have a central bank. Central Banks are operate by some societal elites (kings and queens centuries ago, secretive groups of mostly-anonymous rich bankers in much of the modern world) and they create paper money and coins with assigned "face values" for the public to use in place of actual currency made of something that is actually worth its value. When people used actual gold, silver, and yes copper money that money had inherent worth. The fiat currency of central banks on the other hand is continually adjusted and manipulated by the central banks as they manipulate the economy for their own benefit (you will NEVER meet a poor central banker or any poor politician connected to one).
Inflation is entirely the result of central banks printing too much fiat currency (or nowadays adding more ones and zeroes to their own bank accounts and then lending these new digits to other rich people who pass them out into the economy) relative to the actual condition of the economy. Inflation is nothing more or less than a hidden tax on the poor and middle class who keep getting paid the same dollars, pounds, or euros ... but those units of currency gradually buy less and less over time because the bankers are minting/printing more and more.
Incidentally, this problem of US coins needing to be re-formulated because the coins are suddenly more expensive to make than their newly-depressed face value is nothing new. It has happened several times before, but it is happening more-frequently with every passing year. The US has DOUBLED its debt under the past 7 years of Obama and the Fed (The privately-owned and run Federal Reserve Bank) has been printing money at a higher rate than ever before in US history. If you are under the age of 50, you will pay a very high economic price for this insanity at some point.... it's as unavoidable as hitting the ground after jumping off a cliff; the laws of economics cannot be avoided any more easily than the laws of physics.
Please get rid of the #*($#ing penny! So worthless and so damn many of them!
When the value of the metal in a money piece exceeds the value of the denomination, then you no longer have money. It is just currency that holds no real value at all. Instead of making our coins with cheaper and cheaper metal, maybe we should address the banking system that causes our money to become worthless.
What we really should do is dump the penny, and create a new $3 coin with Lincoln on it.
$3 is actually USEFUL as a coin, as opposed to a dollar, as $3 makes getting change from a vending machine easier for products costing over $1, and also makes paying tolls with coins feasible again.
I guarantee that people would use them more than they use the penny right now.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What military? The militia is intended to be the national defense force. That's why military appropriations have a time limit: standing armies were considered an inherent threat to liberty.
If you're arguing for what the Founders intended we should have, you should be arguing to disband the military as well. If you think that's a stupid idea, then you have a bone to pick with them and the Constitution. Personally, my studies of history have shown very few examples of successful civil resistance* against almost any armed force. It is not merely guns and willpower that make an army, it is a system of command, organization, communications, and logistics. An untrained, unorganized militia is useless as a fighting force. I believe that to defend a country, you need an army, and a couple centuries of American politicians seem to agree with me. On that basis, I believe the Second Amendment to be deeply flawed, and while it has been restricted and reinterpreted by Congress and the courts, we should probably formalize those restrictions with another amendment.
* Please do not suggest the American Revolution as an example: The colonists were armed and bankrolled by the French, who also contributed a sizable army and the world's second largest navy.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Because the government makes money when it costs less to produce them than their face value. This is called 'seigniorage'. They don't want to lose money. Also, people have done things like melting down pennies, though this is illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
inflation erodes at the value of lower demons constantly. my idea is simple: brand new coinage and demoninations, that can last another few decades accounting for inflation. all new items worth 5x their predecessor:
new penny, marked as 1c, worth the current 5c, size: dime
new nickel, marked as 5c, worth the current 25c, size: penny
new dime, marked as 10c, worth the currrent 50c, zied: nickel
no quarter: just use 1, 5 as your denoms like roman numerals
new half dollar, marked as 50c, worth $2.50
new dollar coin, marked as $1, worth the current $5 bill
new dollar bill, marked as $1, worth the current $5 bill (skip if we want to force coin use for this denom)
new $5 bill, worth $25, small size for the blind
new $10 bill, worth $50, medium size for the blind
new $50 bill, worth $250, larger size for the blind (may be too valuable to deter counterfeiters)
this way we still have our smallest unit, the penny, in circulation. old money would get about 10 years remaining to circulate.
they said slavery was legal
they said prohibition was legal
they said women cannot vote
The Federal Reserve Bank should just abruptly announce that pennies are worth a dollar. In one stroke the penny (as we know it) would be no more, and America would have a dollar coin people would actually use. (Not to mention a little financial relief for the lower class penny pinchers.)
:T:R:A:N:S:
stoopid Amerikans, you've got the whole thing backwards.
the whole point of grunt soldiering is NOT to die for your country ... it's to make sure the other guy dies for his.
It is not only the cost of the metal, it is also the economic impact of handling pennies, as explained in a CGP Grey video.
We should be able to get rid of the penny, nickle, and dime all at once -- leaving us with the quarter as the smallest coin.
100 years ago, there were things you could buy with a single penny, such as candy. I believe that inflation has eroded the value of the dollar at least by a factor of 25 since then, so we would suffer no loss of flexibility with respect to 100 years ago if the quarter became our smallest coin.
Note that the price changes would be limited to a maximum of 12 cents per item: you can round to 25 cents by rounding down 1 to 12 cents or rounding up 1 to 12 cents.
Just make plastic coins with holographic certs on them. Think of the economic stimulus as all vending machines everywhere need to be retrofitted to accept them!
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
and round the prices off to the nearest dime
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Now that Canada doesn't have a penny, doesn't that technically mean you made your currency non-metric (div 20) on purpose?
And you can't even blame the USA for this?
So sorry for your loss...
Its the federal reserve making the penny worthless. Back in the 1940's you could buy an appetizer, a small bag of candy, or a few pencils for 1 penny.
This trend of inflation is not inevitable. If we get rid of the penny we are just enabling the Central Banks of the world to continue inflating, destroying our currency and making the rich richer and the poor poorer. The correct answer is to get rid of these central banks and restore a policy of sound currency so that the value of the penny begins to rise again, Becoming useful and giving us a reason to pick them up off the streets again.
The cost of manufacture of coins or paper money is irrelevant if you operate a Fiat Currency, which is what we do.
The cost to make a penny at 0.5c does not make the value of a penny any different than if the cost is 2c ... it's still a penny worth exactly one cent.
You can make an argument that the low value coins have no purpose in the settlement by cash in the payment of goods, but that isn't the same as arguing the coin has no purpose because it costs more than it represents.
The manufacture of your national currency costs what it costs ... it has nothing to do with the agreed value the coin represents (the proof being the value of a given coin doesn't change with changes in the cost of manufacture).
brothers, fathers, children and cousins; while someone else guns down theirs.
All it takes is a Dear Leader, sufficient surveillance control (I bet we have more Total Information Awareness than North Korea does), and making the military a privileged class (oh wait!)... That's 2/3rds of the way there if you're paying attention. While we're very much like Rome in many ways soldier loyalty to their generals is likely not one; loyalty to their paychecks is.
I'm still waiting for my change at the gas pump where the price is 2.17.99 and no the mint will never stop making coins the writer didn't research this enough. The us mint makes a mint by selling mint condition coins,special runs,gold coins. Its not just about change, people collect coins it would bring down a whole industry. Not going to happen IMO
Jack of all trades,master of none
When the US eliminated the half-cent coin in 1792, it had buying power equivalent to $0.14 today. To follow that pattern, we should not only eliminate the penny, but the nickel and dime as well. I would also suggest that we bring back the 50 cent coin, eliminate dollar bills (keeping dollar coins), and add a new $2 coin similar to the €2 coin. Also, can we please make the bills different colors and sizes so I can tell them apart in my wallet?
The purpose of money is to create tax revenue.
I'd argue that the purpose of 'money' is to facilitate trade, by making it easier for me to trade product X (that I made) for products A, B, C, by having a standardized widget of 'worth' that means that I can still get product A even if it's seller doesn't want my product X. It also helps if the currency is easily divided enough that if say, my product X is worth a year's amount of product A(which goes bad in 2 weeks), the trades are still 'fair'.
The purpose of government currency is to facilitate tax revenue.
I don't read AC A human right
>since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen so much that the total production unit costs of the penny and nickel exceed their face value **resulting in financial losses to the U.S. Mint.**
Are they selling the pennies and nickels?!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
and I'm only 77. Postage stamps were 3 cents. Gasoline 20 cents a gallon. Coffee was a dime. Ice cream cone a dime. MIT tuition in 1956 was under $1000. Average new car in 1950 was $1,500. Conclusion: Abandon pennies, nickles, and dimes. Require sales tax to round down. There are two reasons for this debasement of currency: Democrats and Republicans.
the military, is made of people, most of whom care deeply about the Constitution. You must hold these men and women in utter contempt if think that they will automatically follow orders to gun down their brothers, fathers, children and cousins.
You don't have to choose the most extreme example ("gunning down" family members); there are much more subtle ways that you can be relieved of some of your rights.
While I thank you for holding me and my fellow members of the military in high regard, know this: I once asked one of my fellow officers, "if you received an unlawful order to go house-to-house and disarm fellow U.S. citizens, would you obey that order?"
He said "Yes, I'm not going to stick my neck out."
Here's the full text of the amendment: "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
The first part, "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State" is the reason given for not infringing the people's right to keep and bear arms. It seems like the author's hope was that if the people's right to keep and bear arms is not infringed, a well-regulated militia will be more likely to exist and persist.
The US Army could occupy territory currently held by ISIS in about a week. They cannot wage war. Asymmetric conflict is about all they are good for, and enough of that would sap our political will to keep forces in the field, until we left. Great way to spend money and get people killed.
We're not doing that because it doesn't make sense, not because we can't. The sensible thing is not to get embroiled in an interminable guerrilla war, but to let them establish centralized power structures, to let the Strong Man rise up, kill off potential threats to his power, establish a brutal dictatorship, and then when we can be more certain that we aren't chopping off a hydra's head, kill that S.O.B. and force a regime change.
But even if they represented a successful unorganized militia, and even if there weren't an infinity of historical counterexamples, it would still not make sense to have an unorganized militia as our only national defense: this idea was discarded within the Founders' lifetimes. Frankly if you're going to argue otherwise you're going to need to do a lot better than ISIS.
This outlines everything wrong with the American political system. There was a special on this topic this past year on a comedy show.
Basically it goes something like this: Getting rid of the Penny has been tried several times before. It isn't just recently that it has't made any logical sense (pardon pun). When it finally came time to legislate it, a particular politician successfully kills it. The argument was that many charities collect pennies and that to get rid of them would diminish their ability to fund themselves. As it turns out, biggest contributor to these charities, their lobby, and the politician in question was the minting industry and in particular the zinc mining industry (of which all non-valuable coins are made of). Hence the idea of getting rid of the penny dies.
What is even worse, is that the zinc market for coin minting isn't even that big, however it is still cheaper to lobby (i.e. pay off politicians to keep it around), and still make profits off that part of their production. I forget the show, but it was probably John Oliver.
Fortunately, the pure weight of the coin is worth more.
Coin collectors have been talking about this for years both the penny & nickel cost more than their value to mint. Another issue is the dollar coin (yes they exist.) The cost of dollar coins is a lot cheaper and will last much longer than a paper (actually cloth) dollar, but the company that supplies the US Mint with the "rag" (the companies term for the cloth) for paper money has bought and paid for enough congresspeople to insure that the coins are stored away and dollar bills are in circulation. There are warehouses full of dollar coins, you can get them at the bank but expect to wait as they retrieve them from the vault. All of this has been researched and reported to the Mint by their advisory committees, but Congress is getting paid too well to actually change anything. In addition to the copper and nickel lobbies, the coin operators lobby is also against it as they would need to alter the machines to not accept nickels or to accept a different weight coin plus be forced to accept dollar coins, as most machines will not take anything other than nickel, dime, quarter & bills.
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
One hundred years ago a US dollar was worth twenty-three 2016 US dollars and a penny was worth 23 cents. We do not need any coin smaller than a quarter nor any bill smaller than a twenty. We should have only four coins: quarter, $1, $5 and $10. The $20 bill should be the lowest denomination of currency.
In completely related news, the Federal Reserve is barely 100 years old.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
666
I can do without the pesky pennies and dimes, but what is way more annoying is that all US Dollar bills are the same size and color. It is so ridiculously annoying.
Anyone look at a chart of copper lately? Gold? Silver? Oil?