Coins cost more to make than face value

My uncle's friend knows how to burn the copper off, and he also has a nice pile of copper. If I can, I'll ask him, but I don't really know him that well. Sorry.

 

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cave troll, you may be right, but just how many more billions do we need? I don't know which Americans you are talking to, but I have not met one that wants more pennies in circulation, and not one who is worried about which way an amount will be rounded. Seems to be only the few posters on the boards who disagree with the rest of America. LOL.

 

Ahhhhh, so many youngins here....

"Reality check" - example: in Mass. in Boston you need a token to get on the subway. It costs marginally more to hire token sellers, collectors, and token machine repairers than all the money derived from selling the damn things in the first place. If the subway were free it would actually make money for the city. BUT...those are jobs that would be lost, so forget about it.

The Feds will spend to make cents, by Golly, because there is too much pork in the peripheral business - copper/zinc miners, truck drivers, refiners, mint employees, armored car drivers, etc. etc. It is cheaper to keep the status quo than to put all of those people out of work.

 

Yep, sonny. I do hear ye. But that doesn't mean making 15 billion more coins isn't downright stoopid and foolish. LOL BTW, if your subway were free, it would be overrun and shut down with double or triple the riders, so at least the tokens control that.

 

Most importantly as long as a majority of Americans (i.e. voters) support keeping the cent, it will stay.http://www.pennies.org/testimony3.html. Plus the government looses money in ways and amounts that make the $75 million at question seem trivial by comparison, and for politicians eager to cut the pork and get the votes there are eaisier targets with far less public support going for them to aim for.

 

There is a coin store in Newton that sells "collectible" tokens....but legal tender in the subway for $.95 per token. The MBTA is definitely losing money on these...

Mike

 

What you all seem to be forgetting is that the mint makes pleanty off of the other coins they make. Every 1/10 oz. gold eagle makes the mint around $30. (maybe more soon). they make, around 15,000 of them, that is about $450,000 from that one coin, keep going down the line. The money they lose from the penny isn't even noticed.

 

Don''t bet your rent on it memisis! The cent was for years the 'cash' cow of the U.S. Mint, and now that profit isn't coming in. Yes, they will miss it and will make up with price increases in other areas.

 

You're not wrong necessarily, but there are factors other than pure economics of cost vs. value of production. Too many people from copper and zinc miners to union truck drivers to various trade associations for special interests that you could not even imagine existed, would all scream.

Why do you think we have a dollar coin? It was all the work of special interests who would profit from it. Why do we have Silver Eagles and Silver Proof sets? It's not because coin collectors wanted them (although they do, of course) - it was lobbyists for the silver industry who made it happen.

Now....if the choice was to make pennies from aluminum then maybe we'd have a rumble on our hands as the aluminum industry got involved, and maybe they'd win. But, aluminum is not as cheap as it once was, either.

 

I do not care for aluminum coins, they being so lightweight they are practically not easy to count out etc. Some countries such as Ukraine that had aluminium coins early on replaced them with stainless steel later on. I would think stainless steel coins might cost a bit more, but need to be replaced less often. In Ukraine the aluminum 1 and 2 Kopiok coins often got discarded, but the stainless steel examples along with the 5 Kopiok coins circulate still.

 

It's not simply a matter of the mint being willing to saddle the economy with a worthless coin but it's also a matter of it being impossible to keep the coins in circulation at some point. When the coins are worth more than the metal value then eventually they'll just go directly from the coining press to a recycling furnace. coins can't circulate if people are hording them and/ or large numbers are being melted down. Eventually this will just become a bonanza for anyone who can lay their hands on large numbers of coin.

It's a safe bet that there are already substantial numbers of coins being destroyed and this will pick up.

 

Not to continue this but we all should remember that the Mint has to pay for Utility bills as well as everything else. If you own a store you pay for gas, water, electricity, phones. Then there is the taxes on your land. You have to account for materials, equipment, transportation and tons of other items. The Mint never includes all this in their reports of profits and losses. As a government agency they probably don't even know who pays all this. They just say it cost X for material and we charge X+X for it so there is our profit. You try that with a store.

 

Why? It would only be a problem if you are paying your employees in cash under the table. And even then it wouldn't be a problem because you would still calculate the wages the same way and then just round the final amaount. If there were no cents or nickels and you always rounded the wages up just so they wouldn't complain the worst that could happen would be that you would have to overpay them by nine cents.

Believe it or not, you might try a sugar water solution. The problem is that I don't know how much sugar you will need to use so you will just have to keep trying a more and more concentrated solution until you get the density high enough. I think that the sugar water might work because of the tremendous amount of sugar you can dissolve in water. Believe it or not about 5 cups of sugar can be disolved in one cup of water. I don't think you will have to go that far before the solution becomes dense enough either float the Zincolns or at least let them sink slow enough that it can be used to seperate them from copper easily.

The more you dissolve the slower the process will become. You can increase the dissolving speed by gently heating the solution. Care must be taken though not to dissolve more sugar than the solution can hold at room temperature. Doing so will result in a supersaturated solution upon cooling and if that occurs the introduction of a single sugar crystal will result in the entire solution crytalizing.