https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/24/business/elon-musk-doge-penny?cid=ios_app The easy way to save. 3.7 cents now to make one
This is why they need to legalize Civil War and Hard Times tokens again. I know of HTTs that say "a penny saved is a penny earned" and there are probably CWTs that say it as well. Nowadays, they could put on there a correct saying - a penny saved is 3 pennies earned!
So, what are all of you going to do with the 2 seconds you've saved not dealing with pennies during a transaction?
There's another discussion on this. https://www.cointalk.com/threads/elons-looking-at-the-penny.415996/ A purveyor of his own cryptocurrency should not be trusted with decisions regarding US coinage. His motivations are not altruistic.
I like the penny, but don't really care what the government does with it. IMO, there are SO many other ways the government could save $200 million. When it comes to what the government spends and gives away, it seems like a drop in the bucket. Why not mint the cent in copper again so it lasts longer and mint about two-thirds less? I guess spending costs have to start somewhere.
Here you go! The Fuld variety numbers are 180/430a. This variety is the easiest way to get the Franz Sigel "Hero of Pea Ridge" token variety with the motto totally readable. Most of them look like this. This one is variety 180/343a.
Because then they will cost close 5+ cents each and you can't mint 2/3rds less because the new copper cents will continued to disappear from circulation just like the current zinc ones do (probably even faster since they will no have metal in them that is worth considerably more than the face value of the coin) and you will still need more cents to supply the needs of commerce. As long as you make coins for circulation you will still need billions of them no matter what they are made of. Of if you DO only make 1/3 of the number you previously made, you will have a serious coin shortage and the businesses will quickly have to go to rounding up and down anyway. They don't make 4 to 8 billion new cents every year because the economy has grown so much they need that many more, they mint them to replace the coins that get dumped into change jars and removed from circulation each year. To a very large extent the cent is a one way coin from Mint to Bank to Business to consumer to jar. And only a small percentage ever go back from Jar to bank to do multiple rounds.
You can't fill up jars forever though. Wasn't there a coin glut and lower mintage across the board in 2009 from the economy tanking and everybody dumping their change jars? I'm about to do a dump myself because my piggy banks are full again.
Yes when the economy tanked bad a lot of jars got dumped and caused a glut for about a year. So after many years of high production a very bad economy results in about one years worth of production being dumped from jars back into circulation. People don't realize just how easy it is to siphon off an entire years production into change jars. Believe it or not it takes each person removing one coin per week. If you take the annual output of the mint, and divide it by the population of the country, it comes to about 50 coins per person.
But it's not just a single year's coinage that is circulating though. Post-1965 coinage - the vast majority still circulating I'd imagine - would be 60 years worth. Each and every person doesn't have 3000 coins in a jar (I know that's an exaggeration because annual numbers have gone up) so I always have trouble figuring out where it all goes.
Pennies have cost more to mint than their face value since the 1970's. If we were ever going to get rid of them, we would have by now. I don't expect to see them go away any time soon. I'll keep collecting them as long as they keep making them, but I wouldn't mourn them much if they did go away. But I'm not holding my breath.
But 3000 coin will fit in about two gallon jars and while everyone doesn't nave two jar a lot of people have MANY jars. How many people on here have boxes and boxes of Lincoln cents? One box of cents is their coin quota for 25 years or the quota of 25 people for one year. It just takes a few hoarders and it adds up fast. Since the turning in of coin jars only crated a glut lasting one year the number of coins out there NOT being turned in must be huge.
No only for about 17 years. In the early 70's they approached costing more that their face value and they investigated using aluminum to keep the cost down, but then copper went back down and the cost stayed below face. Around 1981 copper was back up and threatened to cross the break even point and we got the copper plated zinc cent and the cost stayed below face. But about 17 years ago the rising cost of metal and manufacturing finally passed the break even point......and we did nothing. And we have been producing cents at a loss since that time.
