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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 25177887, member: 27832"]And to get back to your original question, "what is the government doing about [the excessive cost of making nickels]"... I think the direct answer is "they're doing NOTHING about it, because nobody's pushing them in a particular direction". You've discussed some possible solutions. If the nickel's composition is going to change, I imagine it would change to iron with some sort of plating. That would break all the vending machines and self-checkouts, but so would nearly any other change that significantly reduced the coin's manufacturing cost. (I don't think there's any material that has the same density and EM signature as cupronickel, but is significantly cheaper.) But the answer should be "doing away with every denomination smaller than the quarter, and looking really hard at the quarter". Remember, we did away with the half-cent because it was too small a value for people to bother with -- and its purchasing power at the time was something like seventeen cents in today's money. We're all still pretending that if you "watch the pennies" "the dollars will take care of themselves", but in fact watching pennies is a useless distraction at this point. (Except, of course, for those enlightened enough to look past their face value... <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie1" alt=":)" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />)[/QUOTE]