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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

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

#841

Post by jandrewrogers »

dpark wrote: post #665
jandrewrogers wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely decentralized. The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of multiple different sales tax authorities between which there is no coordination. Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a situation…

> effectively impossible Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z. What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall?

There are many examples of these types of jurisdictional conflicts in the US due to the strong decentralization of authority. These situations almost always rely on non-enforcement, which works until it doesn't and then you find yourself in court. Enforcement sporadically happens, or more commonly happens, someone with a personal axe to grind demands enforcement happen.

I'm all for eliminating the penny and rounding to the nearest 5 cents or whatever. But I am not so callous as to ignore the reality that doing this de facto forces many businesses to break the law because compliance is impossible for reasons completely outside their control.

Maybe you're cool with breaking some eggs to make an omelette but I find it pretty gross and immoral to dictate change without satisfying the preconditions that allow it to occur legally for everyone involved.

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

#842

Post by ProllyInfamous »

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…

Make a dollar coin, the size of a current-half-dollar.

Make a half-dollar coin, the size of the current quarter.

Make a quarter, the size of the current dime.

Get rid of all other coins. Also remove the $1.00 bill.

Start using $2.00 bills (as smallest cash) and stock ATMs with $50 and $10 bills.

Create a new $1000.00 note.

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[not actually] fun fact: removal of the penny results in more nickels being minted, which will actually result in a net-cost for removing penny from circulation.

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

#843

Post by jandrewrogers »

mrguyorama wrote: post #652
jandrewrogers wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems. In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage s…

Somehow, in all of this, you didn't address any relevant point.

Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale, there is no single tax-included price. The US has never retired coinage in the sales tax era, an assumption built into many tax codes. There is no central authority for sales tax or price display nor standardized rules. The rules of multiple authorities apply to single jurisdictions. Changing the sales tax structures that exist are subject to any of statutory changes, voter approval, and constitutional changes, none of which will happen just because it would be convenient for you or anyone else.

Any argument that doesn't address these issues rather than simply dismissing them isn't a serious argument.

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

#844

Post by biztos »

nayuki wrote: post #20

We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination... Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly c…

Are they different sizes so the blind can easily use them?

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

#845

Post by biztos »

zahlman wrote: post #401
rz2k wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are likely misleading. To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. F…

"Dirty" also connotes physical appearance, you know.

If you can’t crumple it up and throw it at someone, it’s not real money.

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

#846

Post by dpark »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #841
dpark wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> effectively impossible Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z. What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall?

There are many examples of these types of jurisdictional conflicts in the US due to the strong decentralization of authority. These situations almost always rely on non-enforcement, which works until it doesn't and then you find yourself in court. Enforcement sporadically happens, or more commonly happens, someone with a personal axe to grind demands enforcement happen. I'm all for eliminating the penny and rounding…

> I find it pretty gross and immoral to dictate change without satisfying the preconditions that allow it to occur legally for everyone involved.

Your claims include that this is effectively impossible and that changes of this type take decades to roll out in the US.

If we take your claims as accurate then the only way to ever make a change like this is to “break some eggs”. The alternative would be for us collectively to stop pretending that effective governance is a unreasonable expectation.

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

#847

Post by jwrallie »

basscomm wrote: post #7
hrimfaxi wrote: post #3

I watched a video on the demise of the penny and its predicament was so succinctly explained: everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them, so we are stuck producing ever more. One news outlet even did an "experiment" where they threw hundreds of pennies on the ground in a city on a busy morning and not one person stopped to pick any up.

> everyone gets pennies as change but few carry them around let alone spend them It's not just pennies, it's all coins. In a former life I worked in retail and almost nobody would fish around in their pockets for exact (or even near) change. They'd always hand me bills for their purchase even if they had just completed a transaction and had the coins in their pocket . That was in the 90's, and I still see it happenin…

People are very lazy to do basic math. I always minimize the coins I am carrying by doing math on my head so that the combined value of a certain coin never exceeds the amount of the next available coin/bill, that way I never exceed the carrying capacity of my wallet.

Most people I know just pocket everything and put on a box at home for undetermined time.

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

#849

Post by dpark »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #843
mrguyorama wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems. In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage s…

Somehow, in all of this, you didn't address any relevant point. Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale, there is no single tax-included price. The US has never retired coinage in the sales tax era, an assumption built into many tax codes. There is no central authority for sales tax or price display nor standardized rules. The rules of multiple authorities apply to single jurisdictions. Changing the sal…

> Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale

What does this mean, and why is it relevant to anything? I feel like you’re trying very hard to insist that taxes are impossible to calculate.

> there is no single tax-included price

There’s no single pre-tax price either. All of this taken together makes it trivial to tune the post-tax price to round to the nearest nickel even if your tax authority hypothetically insists rounding is forbidden. The POS system says you owe 31.67 based on the ticket price and the applicable tax, rounds to a target of 31.65, and then applies a 2 cent discount pretax to your purchase to make this work out.

Hell, gas stations have proven prices can be in fractional cents so you could even calculate and apply a fractional discount if you find an edge case where you can’t discount whole cents and still round to the nearest nickel.

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

#850

Post by ssl-3 »

bogeholm wrote: post #188
mattnewton wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State and local taxes make this infeasible

> 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?

> Is there a reason that couldn’t be done to make all prices + VAT multiples of 5c?

Yes, there are reasons that can't be done.

We don't have VAT in the States; we instead [usually] have sales tax.

And therein: We have something like twelve thousand different sales tax districts, all set at different percentages by combinations of states, counties and municipalities.

Some cities have multiple sales tax rates even within their bounds. My own tiny little city is at the intersection of 3 different counties, and has 3 different sales tax rates: A store on one side of the road has a different tax rate than a store on the other side, and one down the block a ways has yet a third rate.

This reality doesn't have to be ideal. It doesn't have to make sense. This is what we have whether it is awesome or terrible or some combination of both.

It would take a monumental amount of effort to unwind all of that and turn it into something nationally-unified like VAT. This process would take a very long time (perhaps decades), in part because some states don't have sales tax at all and introducing a uniform VAT would represent a very different way for them to go about the ways in which they conduct both commerce and taxation.

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Of course, there's other ways to inject something sane and predictable in the decommissioning of the penny, and there's a number of of them mentioned elsewhere in other comments. But using any of them would have required utilizing an ounce of planning or forethought, and we didn't do "planning" or "forethought" here.

The decision to stop producing came from On High, and was presented in the form of a social media post[1] from the President that declared that it simply would be this way. There was no public planning or discourse involved.

We can talk about whether that's an awesome or terrible way to enact policies, but it doesn't really matter because that business has already been concluded -- with all of the swiftness and grace of eating a ham sandwich.

[1]: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1139772249337...

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