When will the penny be retired?

actually, if you look at the Mint financial reports, the Mint reports a profit on every Half Dollar that they make. They also report a loss on every one of the Cents and Five Cent coins that they make.

 

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The difference is you don't really have a choice with gas, you need gas or you better really like the bus for most people.

Really it's all a pointless argument. Making the penny doesn't crack the top 10,000 list for wasteful spending and if you got rid of it then the no more penny crowd would want the nickel gone ect. If the big argument against it is that it has no buying power then the logical conclusion of that argument is to round to the $1 or $5 and that type of inflation would be insane.

 

Yes, eventually when inflation gets to that point several decades down the road that will be a logical step. Would you prefer that we still had a half cent coin?

 

Wouldn't bother me if we did. That was done away with a long time ago though so. Point was having a penny makes absolutely no difference. Getting rid of it starts going down the path that does start to matter in day to day expenses very quickly.

 

http://www.economonitor.com/dolanec...out-the-penny-this-chart-may-help-you-decide/
Do you own JAH and/or CSTR stock perchance?

 

Hey, our Congress does nothing anyway so what does it matter if they do nothing with the penny or nothing with everything else?

The only thing they're good at is throwing away money and that's why we have such a mess and the one cent coin.

 

Personally I hope that it doesn't happen for at least 5 more years so I have time to hunt down more wheats and copper memorials, but I believe pragmatically it is inevitable and would be good for the country overall to get rid of it sooner than that. Thankfully (in this particular situation) congress does have a reputation of being quite slow so I think realistically we're looking at a currency change happening no sooner than 10 years down the road.

 

https://www.today.com/video/should-the-us-do-away-with-the-penny-matt-lauer-votes-yes-1039581763916

 

More than just seignorage as they sell each of them for more than face value

Seignorage after all costs acording to the mint reports is 33 cents per coin, then add in the extra for what they charge over the face value. Figure 35 cent profit per coin times 4 million coins is $1,320,000. Times two because they make a P and D each year so $2,640,000. But government standards it isn't a lot, but why give it up? At least thats their viewpoint.

 

If we really wanted to do what makes sense, scrap the penny and nickel and have $1 and $5 coins.

 

The US one-cent coin is an anachronism. They no longer have any real value or use. Canada got rid of them and they're doing just fine.

 

How much money has Canada saved, eliminating the 1 cent and 5 cent coin, as well as the 1 dollar note, and going to 1 and 2 dollar coins?
I am sure their mintage was lower as their population is around 10% of the US.
I don't see a $5 coin, but you can eliminate 1 and 2 dollar bills, and use dollar coins.
$1 bills account for the majority of all notes printed, and they are unnecessary.
The dollar coins are only slightly larger and heavier than a quarter, so it's not a burden to carry a few of them around.
The half dollar coin is also an anachronism. A government who wastes trillions of dollars, doesn't need this $1 million dollar a year cash cow.
Read some very interesting posts yest. (different site) about why the half dollar is not needed, and when the decline happened. It happened when they came out with the Kennedy half. 50+ years with a useless denomination coin is enough.

 

It's more than that for that half though. As long as enough collectors want them that they're profitable there's really no reason to abandon them. Even if you exclude half dollar sales on their own, you would also have to lower the price of mint/proof sets and a couple other things they sell with the half missing from it.

Plus their collector offerings are already limited enough compared to other mints around the world, taking that away will just mean an even smaller selection than we already have

 

Curiously, what did they give as the reason that people stopped using the Half when the Kennedy Halves were released?

 

No more political discussions! Read the Rules.

 

Half dollars were very prolific in my youth. The paper I delivered (back in the day) was .30/week and folks would toss you a 'half' on collection day. Love halfs then and I love them now. Then came the coin shortage of '65 and the elimination of silver in our coinage. Clads for the future and as has been said, bad money drives out good. All at once everyone started hoarding silver coins, most notably, half dollars. Ya never saw them in circulation (much) after '65. They may be anachronistic as @Omegaraptor stated, but then again, I'm an anachronism.

 

I never said the half dollar was an anachronism. It's just unpopular for some reason, and as such the mint only strikes them for collectors nowadays.

I said that the one-cent coin is an anachronism because it has no purchase power, is pretty much worthless in this day and age, and in 1857 when the half cent was dropped it was worth 14 cents in today's money. I get that was over 150 years ago, but still.

 

To answer Mike Noodle (and there is nothing political in this discussion)
Here are some of the posts I read yesterday:

Half dollars circulated very freely until the introduction of the Kennedy half in 1964. After that they just stopped being used in regular commerce. There are several reasons why this happened. First, the increasing value of silver at the time caused the silver coins to be hoarded for their silver content. Half dollars were prime targets for this hoarding because they were the largest regular circulation coin at the time (Silver Dollars did not circulate to any extent). Second, the hoarding of the Kennedy halves took place on a massive scale. Essentially, they never did circulate, they were just hoarded.

Half dollars are heavy and useless today. Most people don't carry any money any more.
Vending machines did not accept half dollars.
I think the decline of use of the half dollar coincided with the change over to clad.
A hefty silver half transformed into a big hunk of nothing.
The Kennedy half was in such great demand as a souvenir that it wasn't seen in circulation for a number of years. As a result, when the Kennedy half did return to circulation, most people had forgotten the denomination and those who did couldn't use them in vending machines, at which point the denomination pretty much stopped being used, except in some slot machines.
When the silver was removed from the dime and quarter, the half still had 40% silver, so a lot of people saved the halves.

They freely circulated in the 1950s. They stopped in 1964....everyone hoarded the "new" Kennedy halfs as they were felt to be collector items or momentos to our beloved recently slain president. Then with the switch to clad in 1965 everyone started hoarding all silver coins. They never caught on again after 1965 .
When I was child and in my early teens, I used to get half dollars in change. It didn't happen a lot, but most all of the coins I did get were worn down to Fine or VF. I can't remember ever getting a Mint State half dollar in circulation. Sometimes I would get a well worn Walker, but that was unusual.
The Kennedy half dollar changed everything for the 50 cent piece. People hoarded them as souvenirs and did not spend them. Just at the time when the novelty with the Kennedy coin might have come to an end, silver prices began to be creep up to the point where the metal content of the 90% silver coins was approaching their face value. That combined with a shortage of silver resulted in the Coinage Act of 1965. That give us our current clad coinage and, for a while, the 40% silver Kennedy half dollar. Had the half dollar been made into a copper-nickel clad coin instead of a silver clad coin, the Kennedy might have returned to circulation.
In the coming years silver prices reached the point where the 40% silver half dollars were worth more than their face value. People hoarded them as well. In 1971 the Kennedy half dollar became a base metal clad coin. At that point it made no sense to hoard them, but people continued to do it. They were confused by the fact that the 1965 to 1970 coins could be melted for a profit, but the later coins could not. They hoarded everything. I can't tell you how many private hoards of coins I've seen that had copper-nickel clad half dollars in them. People were surprised when I'd tell them, "Spend this in good health."
That sums up the death of the half dollar. It had nothing to do with the weight of the coin, at least not initially. The coin just couldn't get into circulation to any extent because, first, the Kennedy fascination and, second, because people were confused over its melt value.
Between the switch to clad (making coins just as worthless as paper); and inflation at it's height in the late 60's and early 70's, the weight (and size) to value ratio dropped, and make paper money replacement more feasible.
The other death knell was the rise of the general use credit card (such as BankAmericard) in the late 60's. Carrying cash in general was less popular.
I also agree with the switch to the Kennedy seemed to make it (at the time) more of a commem than a circulating coin.
Halves were heavy and a pain to carry around. I could never get them to fit in my bell-bottom jeans.
Why not use half and dollar coins now? The vending machine industry does not want to retool plus it would appear to the public an open admission that our money has declined in value. Half dollar coins are probably too bulky for our current pay by cell phone culture.

 

I bet if they had gone to clad like everything else people likely would have kept using them. No matter the material the 64s were probably going to be hoarded given what had happened, but by the following year it's likely they may have started circulating normally again

 

I postulate, that if the goobers hadn't changed things around, left things as they were, not blamed collectors for a coin shortage, that we'd still be using a half dollar today.