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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.
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.
I say get rid of pennies, nickels, and dimes. I volunteer at a coffee house whose prices (incl. tax) are all multiples of $0.25. Both customers and volunteers love it. (They accept lower denominations as payment, but don't keep them in the register.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
Wouldn't one just round up to the nearest quarter for tipping purposes anyway? When I holidayed in Canada and the US I used to chuck my small coinage in the tip jar out of courtesy anyway, i.e. that $2.70 caffe latte becomes $3 in no time...
(disclaimer: in my country we don't tip)
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.
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
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 say get rid of pennies, nickels, and dimes. I volunteer at a coffee house whose prices (incl. tax) are all multiples of $0.25. Both customers and volunteers love it. (They accept lower denominations as payment, but don't keep them in the register.)
^ This, all this...
Pennies, nickels, and dimes, really serve little purpose anymore. You can do electronic transactions to the penny, but there is little need to keep these three coins around.
Debasing in of no relevance since we haven't used coins of any precious metal since before I was even born. Their composition now is only relevant to appearance, durability, and weight.
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 $100?
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
There are lots of people who have large stockpiles of small coins they are hoarding.
Because there isn't anything you can buy with even pounds of them.
bickerdyke
Throughout history have significantly exceeded their face value to produce.
This is not actually a loss though - since the value of a coin is not the value on it's face - that's merely it's value to one individual. It's value to the economy = it's face value * however many trades it will be used for.
That gives a much higher margin for coins to still be made without a loss.
This sounds like typical republican/libertarian/austrian oversimplification of the issue leading to utterly false conclusions.
A more likely scenario is simply that, as small denomination coins have been used less and less the second part of the equation has shrunk enough that now production costs exceed the actual economic value of the coin.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Hi folks,
I'm a professional metals trader, and the initial claim ("since 2006 the prices of metals used in coins have risen") is simply not true.
Here is a table for Copper, Nickel and Zinc (the 3 main metals used in minting coins) average yearly price, based on the official prices from London Metals Exchange (www.lme.com) which is the world reference for metals price:
Copper (in US$/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.
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 -----------------------------------
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!
So someone could sell the coins for a neat profit. Get the coins, convert to metal and sell the metal rods/sheets for a profit.
Why don't they use plastic coins? They would be lighter (so you can hold more change), smaller (so your pant pockets are not bulging), and cheaper to manufacture.
...while you are at it. Coins without numbers are lame.
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.
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.
not even that... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
...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.
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.
I hate to be off topic but why would anyone volunteer at a coffee house?
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.
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?
While we're at it, ditch the quarter. If we need a coin worth around $0.25, make it $0.2. We can even still call it a quarter, just to piss off foreigners. Technically, that is even correct with "bankers" rounding. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I live in a college town, and it provides a place to study or just hang out while being more affordable than Starbucks (we make no profit so the prices are just based on costs plus bills).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
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
And those materials can be used for reconfiguring coin machines! The circle of life.
I round up to the nearest dollar for tipping.
"If you can't spare half a dollar, you can just keep your &%#^ing dime"
Does no one remember the Tipping Song?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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
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.
Any revamping of a currency gives the issuing country a seignorage bonus: the obsoleted coins acquire numismatic value and are taken out of circulation.
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 ]
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.
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:
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.
The supreme court isn't supposed to just make shit up. The US Constitution (during prohibition) included the 18th amendment:
----
Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
---
So, yeah, Congress had the explicit legal power to prohibit alcohol.
If you don't think the second amendment is a good idea in the modern world, you should lobby for its repeal, not pretend it says something other than it says.
-Dave
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...
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
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!
$2.50 / 1.06 = 2.35849056604; price it as $2.36 and the register rings up $2.50 after the sales tax is added; or more likely price it at 2.60 and round down to 2.75
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
A couple of reasons I can think of:
1) Charity shop.
2) To get a job history in a down market when no one is hiring without (recent) experience.
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.
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."
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.
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.
A few local places have caught on to that. You see a bunch of weird prices, but figure it out pretty quick when everything always totals up in increments of 0.25 (or whatever). The problem is chains that want to advertise prices in a larger area. Dollar menu, $99 TV, 6 pack for $2.50, whatever, and sales taxes are different everywhere. They could solve that by including the tax in the sale price, but that has two problems - sales tax is different everywhere, so they'll actually get different amounts of money for the item depending on where they sold it, and if they include sales tax and their competitors do not then their advertised prices will be higher than the competition which is a problem (even if the total price the consumer pays is less).
It's not just the weight. If that was all, it would be easy to come up with a coin of the proper weight and size by mixing in different metals, or by making a sandwich coin out of two metals that have different densities. The problem is a lot of electronic machines use electro-magnetic fields to help distinguish coins, and if the electro-magnetic signature is different the machine will reject the coin even if it's the right size and weight. That's why the "golden" dollars are made out of such a bizarre alloy (that looks terrible when it gets worn and tarnished), because the mint wanted the coins to "look" like a Susan B. Anthony dollar to vending machines that use electro-magnetic signatures but still wanted a golden color.
Few in the US really advertises prices any more there is usually a weasel word phase Like "subject to dealer participation" or "prices may vary" and always at least "Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii".
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds