Executive Order to stop minting cents

The government had everyone scared with their draconian edicts and contradictions. I was wiping down everything that came in the house with alcohol before it became obvious it wasn't necessary. Everything was being closed except stores that had created grocery departments in the last several years and grocery stores. This meant banks as well were closed.

People were still spending nearly as many coins as before but coins weren't coming back to the FED through the closed banks.

Anything at all that causes peoples coin jars to swell creates a coin shortage and higher mintages. And coin jars were swelling and the mint was down or on reduced production. I think they made coins the entire year but I suspect manpower shortages prevented full production part of the year. I don't know. A lot of the coins seen by the end of 2020 were brand new '19 or '20 issues.

Coins are much safer to use than bills because bills absorb moisture and germs making them an excellent vector for disease. Not only do most coins have some antimicrobial properties but they dry very quickly and the germs die.

 

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Maybe the folks that have jars of cents will start dumping them in the future. There may be some cool stuff to be found.

 

Yeah I keep as many as I can find now.

 

For better or for worse, tap-to-pay or NFC payment are best of all by that measure, because the token never leaves your hand or touches another. (Data, of course, is a separate issue.)

 

Do you hoard the zincs? They seem to deteriorate pretty quickly, just based on the limited amount of pocket change I see.

 

I'm not going to stop whining about them, but to be fair, if you keep them dry, they're fairly stable.

 

Ever hear of the parable of the broken window? To make the story short, a kid breaks a window, and people argue what he did was a good thing because of all of the economic activity stimulated because of the need to fix the window. The reason why it's a fallacy is because if the window didn't need to be fixed, all the labor and resources used to fix the window could have been instead used for things more productive and beneficial. The town's economy is overall poorer by the cost of fixing the window.

If people didn't have those jobs and tasks they could instead have jobs and tasks that are more productive and beneficial to both themselves and the economy as a whole. Because of lost opportunity costs, destruction, and in this case waste, are net negatives to the economy. Conversely eliminating or at least reducing waste is a net positive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

 

Or be on unemployment that further puts a drain on the economy.

 

Ban windows?

 

No just use bulletproof glass
Lol

 

The story was written before unemployment benefits were a thing. I'm not opposed to unemployment benefits being a temporary thing to help people that, through no fault of their own, are out of work and unable to find new work, but we shouldn't indefinitely pay people not to work to the point it incentivizes people to just live off the benefits without bothering to find work. Those people, not employed in all the activity needed for the window repair, can instead be employed in more productive endeavors. Maybe the shop owner, not having to pay to have his window fixed, can invest more into his business or hire more people, say those people not involved in the window repair.

Destruction and waste are ALWAYS a net negative to the overall economy and you shouldn't look at each individual aspect of it without also considering the whole. (The entire point of the broken window story is that there are hidden costs, now commonly known as opportunity costs, when production has to be diverted from what it otherwise would have been used for.) Otherwise you get people saying war is a positive to the economy, or crime, or natural disasters, or destruction, or various wasteful programs and expenditures by the government. Everything useless or wasteful the government doesn't spend money on is money that can now be spent on something more useful and beneficial. As Benjamin Franklin said (a quote especially appropriate considering the topic lol) "a penny saved is a penny earned."

 

Credit cards are highly inefficient, promote scam calls, and less safe than silver coins. They are safer than other metals but the difference in nominal.

 

This "Old-Timer" is really appreciative of your positive reminder that my unrepaired property is a benefit to society, instead of the detriment that county officials state! RICH

 

YES!! That is why I use my green paper "notes" to collect 69-70 certified condition Gold coins that don't even oxidize causing a degrading effluent in the atmosphere! LOL

 

I think you missed the point (assuming you're not just joking; hard to tell on the internet these days). Still even if you were joking, for the benefit of others: The point isn't that the window shouldn't have been fixed after the kid broke it; the point is that the overall economy is worse off because the kid broke the window. It's the kid, not the people involved in the window repair, that made the town's economy worse off, because all the activity and resources involved in fixing the window could have been used for things more productive and beneficial if the window hadn't been broken. The story is basically a way of illustrating the concept of opportunity cost, and how any property destruction (or waste) is always a net negative to the economy.

 

All wealth is created by the creation of mutually beneficial trade. Two parties contract to do something in which both profit or at the very least, one profits more than the other loses.

This is the problem now. Most money is made through destruction. Companies cheapen products and customers don't know. There's less wealth but the company profits. Companies shut down and everyone losses except a few. Someone gets hit by a car and lawyers make a mint as the one victim loses his ability to be productive and the other loses millions of dollars to the lawyers and other victim. Usually the second victim is everyone because we all pay taxes and insurance premiums. The world is worse off. Much of our economy runs on destruction called by many names like "planned obsolescence", the production of garbage and unneeded things like pennies, and "insider trading".

This has all been made possible by the tremendous productivity gains made possible through ever larger machines and computers. Most of the economy isn't about needed things but the destruction of wealth and it's all done at exceedingly low efficiency.

People mistakenly believe money is wealth and this is why we accept the greatest of all evils to society, greed, as a good thing. We think anyone who gets rich is great even if he falls in front of retail stores for a living or represents those who do.

 

FTFY.

YW.

 

Blast it….. And I thought I was done with cents when I plugged that last hole in my Whitman #2.

 

Now that Lincoln cents are completed there might be a lot of people updating their sets.

Zincolns will always remind me of waste and greed but a they can be very attractive anyway sometimes.

 

I like the sometimes comment.