31–40 of 151 posts
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins. Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
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Many issues probably don't need the lengthy deliberative processes that stall or delay change. But the problems with the penny have been apparent for years, maybe even decades. There was plenty of time to study the issue, observe how other economies have made similar transitions and figure out how to make it work in an orderly fashion. Instead, we have a change by executive decree, with no apparent planning. Will the…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents
They care more to keep the cent than normal Americans, who ultimately pay for its cost of manufacturing, care to get rid of it. So they'll always win a careful, deliberative process; because they'll show up for the cent _every time_ this comes up. And everyone else gets mildly shafted for no reason.
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins. Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
*precedent
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins. Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
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It is always best that important government moves are done in public, with processes that are replete with discourse and understanding, instead of with surprises and confusion.
Ideally, the government would had resolved the (present-day, recently-introduced, inevitable, foreseeable) conflict with SNAP benefits and come up with a single-page, large-print summary that uniformly defined how rounding at the checkout counter works in ways that regular people conducting regular transactions would be able to comprehend and follow.
These details certainly all need to be figured out at some point, and sooner would be better than later: We should have started figuring it out years (perhaps even a decade) ago.
Unfortunately, we did not take that path.
Discontinuing the penny could have been a very orderly nothingburger wherein everyone (on all sides of the cash register) knew exactly what to expect, and exactly when to expect it. But but we didn't do it that way.
So instead, we now we have an element of surprise and confusion instead of simplicity.
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Several points: firstly i would assume every country has a process for disposing of bad and worn out notes and coins. If not i'm sure someone could work out how to profit from recycling dead pennies in true capitalist fashion. This leads on to my second point which is when the government has time they should get around to issuing a bill removing pennies (and maybe other smaller denominations) from legal tender. But t…
"A coin’s typical lifespan is 30 years. See https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-300.pdf, page 6."
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins. Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
> Folks can take them to a bank FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.
Supposedly it cost gov 4 cents to mint 1. Does it have to be done with zinc tho? Why not plastic or some cheap material? Although you may be able to 3D print a penny at home (just like it being made from zinc can actually stop someone), but just like with a real one, its not like you will show up at your local bank with $1 million dollar worth to deposit.
The other option would be to rebase the currency such that a single penny was a meaningful unit of money again. One potential such way would be to issue new paper notes which represent the old note with a decimal place move such that $10 becomes $100. This has been done before but might not be a great idea for the USA.
This is all a bit hyperbolic. Stopping minting pennies made sense and has precedent. There used to be half penny coins. Also, pennies are still legal tender. Folks can take them to a bank or other venue and cash them in. They’re not “trash.”
> Folks can take them to a bank FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.