Let it be known that I’m capable of recognizing a good Trump action, however rare they may be
We reuse pennies so this claim has never made sense
Right, so we can keep reusing the ones in circulation. This is to stop making more of them.
Canada did this a long time ago for similar reasons, and many other countries have stopped production of equivalent low-value coins as well.
Can’t argue with this one.
The idea of doing away with the penny misses the point.
The question is why does it cost three cents to produce a penny? Can we make a penny for less? I’m suspecting it could be done.We should try that first because the loss of that denomination will have repercussions.
Who do you think it will cost every time a purchase comes to $0.96? You, the consumer, will be expected to eat the difference; the business never will. This seems like an innocuous loss, but consider how much 337,000,000 of us will leave on the table over the course of a year.
Better to streamline production and reduce costs so everyone’s math makes sense.
The question is why does everyone think of this as a single use item? If a penny gets used 4 times it covers its cost.
If a penny gets used 4 times it covers its cost.
It does not, because each use does not generate $0.01 in revenue for the government. Let’s say it costs $0.05 to make a penny. Every 20 pennies produced collectively costs everybody $1. It doesn’t matter how many times that penny is used, because it still costs 5x more to produce than it will provide back to the government, as a result of its existence. Even if it’s used 5 times, will the government get $0.05 as a result of that? Of course not.
Let’s say each penny costs $1,000 to make. Making 1,000,000 pennies would cost a billion dollars. That means to produce $10,000 in pennies, you’d devalue everybody’s money, collectively, by $1B. Obviously, pennies don’t cost this much, but at scale, I hope you can see that even the estimated $0.037/penny it costs adds up to significantly larger amounts, and those amounts do have a meaningful effect on the economy.
It’s a matter of inflation. If it costs more to produce the money, but you retain the same demand to use money, then you will cause inflation, because you will have to create more currency, to fund the creation of currency.
It’s not a matter of cost-per-use, it’s a matter of cost-vs-revenue.
No, that’s not the point.
Other nations that did away with smaller denominations simply round to the nearest denomination of the smallest unit they have available (e.g. $0.05), so $0.96 would come out to $0.95. When using card, prices stay the same, since digital money is easily divisible into smaller amounts without needing to worry about issuance.
There’s also the collective cost argument, which essentially means that since this cost to produce currency is a direct inflationary impact on the money we all hold, and is an expense by the government, which represents the populace, then if a penny costs $0.03 to make, if it takes you more than, say, 10 seconds to get pennies out to pay with them, your hourly wage is actually higher than the time you wasted just fiddling around with that penny.
Can we make a penny for less?
Probably, but what’s the point even keeping the penny around if it’s fundamentally useless to most transactions? Nobody can buy any individual item with a penny anymore, nobody pays for any items with a combination of just pennies since they’re still too tiny to easily amount to a value that’s worth your time to count (e.g. counting 25 pennies to buy a lollipop is extraordinarily tedious compared to just pulling out a single quarter, or two dimes and a nickle), and their primary purpose at this point is just to account for businesses pricing their goods at one penny under the nearest dollar amount to trick your brain into thinking it’s cheaper. It’s a fundamentally hostile currency to store, use, and receive change in.
Except 99% of people pay with credit/debit cards.
Besides, if it takes you more then 5 seconds to get the penny, count it and use it again, you worked below minimum wage for that penny.
Would it round to the closest denomination? So $1.04 would round to $1, and it would then even out.
Edit: that’s how it works in my country at least.
Edit 2: got it wrong, $0.96 would round to nearest ¢5(assuming it’s the smallest US denomination) so $0.95, and $1.04 would round up to $1.05
Remember, when you see these little nothing “wins” it’s just meant to soften you up for a bigger piece of shit you’re about to be forced to swallow. Like when a few of the trump supreme court justices pretend to vote on the side of reason to claim they contain multitudes. They [crying] love beer, boofing in the devil’s triangle, being under his eye, going on billionaire kompromat vacations and dismantling the society you’re trying to care for your family within.
It’s not even a win. Pennies are still necessary because retailers like to use prices like $x.98/99. If retailers made a concerted effort to round up or down to the nearest nickel, it would be a win. But they don’t.
So now we’re going to have a penny shortage here soon enough for those who like to use cash. Better start hoarding now. You may be able to get $0.05/pennie soon enough.
Canada does this and it’s quite success. Jeez.
Yep, the market just lost .04 on every transaction across the board. And how u gonna calculate tax now?
It’s called “psychological pricing”, although I’ve always seen the term “just-under pricing”.
First, it’s not even true that prices are rounded to the nearest cent. Gas is typically priced with an extra 9/10 of a cent. Fractional cents are used in accounting (like compound interest), even if they are discarded in the final results. Places that have done similar still use the small values when processing electronic transactions (credit cards), but don’t collect when paying cash.
Pricing rules can also easily adjust over time. When it was discontinued, the US half-cent was worth about the same as a modern dime. I could see us getting rid of the penny and nickel (and probably the quarter, since it won’t make sense without a nickel). Prices would then just have a single decimal place, like $9.9 instead of $9.99.
The price at checkout just rounds to the nearest nickel by law. Pennies needed to go 10 years ago, it’s been great here
For 99% of things I completely agree. But pennies can make for cheaper and better quality bases for some wargame models and also penny pushers at the arcade are pretty fun. Pushing the minimum spend up on those significantly would not be great.
Overall it is probably still worth it but there are some good things we will lose.
There are plenty of pennies in circulation for those uses and still will be for decades or centuries.
1% is awfully generous here
There is absolutely zero truth to that statement whatsoever. There are a grand total of zero federal laws which require retailers, or anyone for that matter to round to the nearest nickel… There may be a state or two who do this, and that’s great. But no one is required federally to do it. So saying that it’s “by law” is not only misleading, but it’s a boldface fucking lie.
Sounds like OP was from Canada.
Considering the post he was replying to was about a US President telling the US Treasury to stop minting a specific US currency, OP is beyond stupid.
Brother, he’s from Lemmy.ca and is speaking about it like it’s been the case for a while. It’s okay to misread a situation without blaming someone else.
So a Canadian makes a statement in a US thread, about a US policy by a US President mistaking the situation and applying logic from a completely different country and passing it off like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and I’m the bad guy?
This place is just as shitty as Reddit sometimes, I guess.
Don’t worry, they’ll round up or down, but if you pay by card they get the exact amount.
“or down”. You’re so silly.
Round up the charge or down the change
I was making a joke about businesses rounding down when they could make more money by rounding up. Go capitalism!
Yes indeed.
I then took it a step further to joke about a wonderful business opportunity to make $ on either side of the transaction.
Oops. I definitely misread your comment as “change” and “change”.
Don’t know why you’re downvoted, this is exactly how it works in the Euro countries that abandoned the 1 and 2 cent coins.
Canada, too.
Dollars are the new cents
Is he trying to run afoul of the zink lobby? Those folks go hard.
If those people destroy Trump and Elon, I’ll be somewhere between love and hate.
Those folks go hard.
I would say 2.5 on a scale of 1-10.
spoiler
Yes, I looked up the hardness.
I hate that he’s the only person who could get away with this. I hate that he’d’ve campaigned heavily and successfully on the opposite of this if Biden or Obama had gotten rid of pennies. But I do appreciate no more pennies.
Hey donny dipshit, I’d be real triggered if you replaced the $1 and 5 with coins.
a nickel (0.05$) costs 14 pennies (0.14$) to make
So the nickel pays for itself once its changed hands 3 times?
no. physical currencies have a more complex formula on a good “cost vs use” ratio. it’s usually many years of use to justify spending any amount of resources on a physical currency, otherwise the currency would collapse under its own weight of having to create itself
He’s making an economics joke I believe. Econ 101 was a long time ago, so I could be off the mark here, or misremembering, but I believe money is counted every time it changes hands. Alice buys something from Bob for a nickel, Bob turns right around and purchases something from Alice using that same nickel. The nickel is still only worth 5 cents, but its responsible for 10 cents worth of GDP.
Or maybe not, and I’m REALLY misremembering econ 101.
It’s a slow day in some little town… The sun is hot… the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night. As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher. The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer. The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store. The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit. She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room bill with the motel owner. The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything. At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves. NOW,… no one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.
That version from here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html
Something something velocity of money something I never took econ 101.
there is no way coins are that expensive
edit: fuck
If pennies were accepted by vending machines, I’d actually spend them more often than saving them up in a giant pickle jar that I take to a coinstar once it’s full and get like $10.
The only reason we still have pennies is the zinc mining companies bribing Congress. They’re the only losers here. (And they aren’t just going to close the zinc mines. So, the workers/miners probably won’t even be hurt. Just some owners/shareholders.)
bribing Congress
exactly.
i’m all for getting rid of it. but this goes through congress, first. then they send it to the white house for a signature.
a president, and i don’t give a fuck who it is, can’t rewrite legislation, or the constitution, whenever or however the fuck they want.
What will happen ta all the penny smashing tourist machines.
Those were alteady technically illegal because defacing money (even a penny) is a felony.Edit: see below commentA bunch of them have already swapped out to use penny-sized metal blanks instead.
This isn’t true. Defacing money for the purpose of fraud or to melt coins for their metal value is illegal but creating elongated coins is not. Elongated Coin Legality
Oh, interesting, you’re correct. I didn’t realize ‘intent to fraud’ was one of the requirements for it to be a felony. I saw one of the machines that uses the metal slugs and assumed they were all switching over because of that.
Oh thank god. Do like Canada
donald trump can have my ass pennies, I’m sure he’s used some of them already
You stick pennies in your ass?!?
Also trump orders astronauts to use pencils like the Russians do. That’s $10,000.00 per space pen. Hooch savings hooch!
Good job broken clock
Canada did it first…
