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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

#821

Post by mattnewton »

drdec wrote: post #379
mattnewton wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State and local taxes make this infeasible

It's the same way with the penny. Tax on a 0.99 item isn't coming out to an exact penny multiple. So stores are already dealing with this situation

Yes, stores are dealing with this alongside a whole legal framework today. They would not have the benefit of that for any changes without pennies, and in a few cases may open themselves to legal liability by underpaying state sales tax, overcharging snap recipients, etc etc. We don’t know because this was just a tweet decree by the executive while the legislature has been paralyzed.

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

#823

Post by mkhalil »

jjcm wrote: post #743
varenc wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything measured by weight is already rounding prices to the nearest cent. If something is $1/lb and I have 0.995 lbs of it, I get charged $1.00 not 99.5 cents. Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different. Of course we don't expect anyone to be charged fractional cents because our currency doesn't support it. So just changing our smallest currency unit from 1 cent to 5 cents.

> Presumably just rounding to the nearest 5 cents isn't that different The above context was that rounding to 5 cents might be illegal due to laws regarding SNAP debit prices being different than cash prices.

That's why it should be rounded for everything. No pennies should probably mean that any final transaction totals are rounded to the nearest nickel. Whether they pay with cash, credit, debit, snap, gift card, etc...

IMO, rounding for cash purchases only sounds worse than keeping the pennies.

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

#824

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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.

Get rid of SNAP.

Problem solved.

(/s)

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

#826

Post by dragonwriter »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #433
dragonwriter wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans like to pretend that history and the experience of the rest of the world doesn't exist and that things that large numbers of other countries have done successfully (and which even the US has done in the past, in this case, as the half-penny, after all, was phase out a long time ago) are impossible to do successfully.

Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased out in the mid-19th century. The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems that needed to be solved in other countries. These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these probl…

>These problems can't be legislated away

Yes, they can.

> because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.

So are the problems. And the places where the problems are localized to are the ones with the power to legislate them away. An abrupt elimination of the penny, such as them being immediately banned for use or withdrawn from circulation, would present a problem, sure, but stopping minting them while leaving them in circulation provides a combination of time to find a solution and urgency to implement it; and the problems aren't difficult to solve, there are lots of easy solutions (there's no fundamental difference in the challenges of the quantum of cash being $0.05 that are different from it being $0.01, there's just a few options in how to handle the transition) and all that is necessary is for each jurisdiction to pick one.

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

#829

Post by what »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #536
patrickthebold wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is gas sold as a whole penny amounts in those locations? Where I am it's always something and 9/10ths of a cent.

The amount is only rounded at the end of the transaction. Those fractions make a difference if you're buying more than a few gallons

Is the amount rounded before or after taxes? Must be after or you have to round again. So who eats or gains the rounding? The merchant or the tax collector?

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

#830

Post by jedimastert »

martin82 wrote: post #827

This sounds it will be a milestone recorded in the history books in the chapter of the accelerating downfall of the US empire into hyperinflation...

The US is not even close to the first modern country to move away from single cent coins, and there are many examples of others that don't have "hyperinflation", for example the Netherlands, Italy, and Canada.

People have been talking about getting rid of the penny for decades.

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