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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

cnn.com

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Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#441

Post by jrmg »

rando001111 wrote: post #393
kjkjadksj wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing

This is one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none. Wasting money is bad. I should not have to explain further.

A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility.

It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes.

...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of exchange that signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less to make than they do.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#442

Post by axiolite »

toast0 wrote: post #256
Night_Thastus wrote: post #141

I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now. It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything. Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a c…

Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and they'll quickly leave. Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.

It's impractical to eliminate the nickel and penny, while keeping the quarter and dime. The most practical way forward is to keep only the dime, but people will be quite upset about the loss of the quarter.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#443

Post by pests »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #249
bogeholm wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> State and local taxes make this infeasible I don’t see why that would be the case? In my country, most prices with VAT (which is what you’re charged) are nice, round numbers, but not the price without VAT. I suppose the stores set a target price, and then adjust it a bit to make the price + VAT a “nice” number. Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?

Several reasons, it really is a mess. The local tax is set by multiple independent tax authorities that change their taxes independently, the tax you see is the aggregate of those independent authorities computed separately, which do not coordinate with each other. Some of these taxes are conditional at point-of-sale, late-binding the taxes, such that different customers are subject to different rates across these ta…

I've seen stores advertise "we pay your sales tax" like furniture outlets. Wouldn't this allow for legal priced items?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#444

Post by daedrdev »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #225
rando001111 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.

I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing

I would prefer if we do not spend billions of dollars each year on pennies when we could do something actually productive with that money.

People do not reuse pennies. They are lost and forgotten about much of the time.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#445

Post by hypeatei »

simpleguitar wrote: post #273
b112 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're referencing more than pennies, but to speak to pennies, I find the current rounding noise in the US to be weird. Likely, it's just more of the media, talking heads, and youtube personalities trying to turn a nothing into something, story. Back when we did it in Canada, I don't recall a single person I knew concerned about penny rounding. Everyone was sick of pennies. No one cared. Everyone was happy. An…

As the article points out, there are laws that say people who pay via SNAP debit cards "cannot be charged more than others". If cash payments are rounded down, but debit card payments aren't, they are in violation of state law. The article also points out that rollback of pennies in Canada and other places were planned, addressing these kinds of issues. USA is doing it with no such planning.

> there are laws that say

Hmm, maybe this is why it should be handled by Congress and not at the whim of the executive. They can handle all this in one piece of legislation.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#447

Post by thatguy0900 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #417
dyslexit wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also points out that some states and a lot cities require retailers to provide exact change. Congress would need to pass legislation to allow rounding nationally. I'm guessing in the meantime they'll continue holding pennies from previous years?

If the national government literally stops creating a certain precision of money, i expect the "exact change" requirement should be invalid.

You volunteering your business to be the the test legal case for that? Or are you stocking pennies?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#448

Post by toast0 »

giantg2 wrote: post #84
delecti wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kwik Trip, a family-owned convenience store chain that operates in the Midwest, decided to round down cash purchases in stores where it hasn’t been able to find pennies. They're rounding all cash transactions down to the nearest nickel, so an average of 2 cents per transaction, 3.4 million customers, gives me $68,000 assuming each "customer" makes a single transaction per year. If they mean that there are 20 millio…

I would bet they have a way to write it off. Edit: why disagree? Can't the write it off as a loss, uncollected account, or promotional? Maybe even goodwill

Writing it off as a loss isn't useful.

Without a write off, their income is $X (what they actually collected), with a write off, their income is $Z (what they should have collected) - $Y (what they didn't collect), but $X = $Z - $Y. There's no material difference between counting what they actual collect as income vs what they should have collected minus the goodwill discount. Unless there's some specific tax justification (maybe accounting differences could justify remitting less sales tax overall and retaining more of the funds, etc)

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#449

Post by dpark »

echelon wrote: post #340
smeej wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy two things at $1.03 or $1.04, it's $2.06 or $2.07 and rounds down to $2.05 more often than it's $2.08 and rounds up to $2.10. That's not "some clever ways." That's so basic it's absurd. They don't know how many things you're going to buy. They don't know how many things anyone is going to buy. There's no way to game the entire system for every combination of things people might buy. Never mind this: When w…

If there is no rounding down, it could amount to more. Hypothetically if you incur 10,000 transactions per year with the max rounding up of $0.04 per transaction, you're out $400. This doesn't make a huge impact to individuals, but it absolutely will to large volume businesses.

You’re arguing about nonsense scenarios. Hypothetically every business could also tack a “convenience fee” of $20 on every purchase like TicketMaster and make 200k off this imaginary customer.

Also even if a business rounded up every transaction, the expected benefit is 2 cents per transaction vs fair rounding, not 4 cents.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#450

Post by [deleted] »

isleyaardvark wrote: post #413
mjd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, 5111 is more pertinent here. 5111(a)(1) says “shall mint and issue coins” but qualifies it explicitly with “in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States”. This is a clear delegation of authority. If you don't think zero pennies is a permissible amount, what about one penny? Two? What minimum number are you arguing for here, and what's your justification for it? I…

If Congress had wanted to get rid of the penny, they would have done so, since they specifically have the power to “coin money” under Article 1, Section 8. In fact they have introduced a bill to do just that, that has not passed yet, which means they have not done that.

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