Would this compromise work for the "Eliminate the Penny" Debate?

Edge reeding, FTW!

 

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Here's another statistic I'd like to know -- what percentage of coins (adding up to 100%) are struck at each of the Mints, in terms of pieces, regardless of face value.

 

Yes, and millions upon millions of SBA dollars remain in storage waiting for .....?? According to many, the profit to the Treasury is the primary reason for minting small dollars. What foolishness!
Edit: You are correct about halves circulating widely for so many years. Back in the 1960s I was a paperboy and many of my customers paid with half dollars.

 

Buy them two at a time, for a total cost of $3.96, which would be rounded down to $3.95. STICK IT TO THE MAN!!!

 

Here's a better idea: drown out the zinc lobby with the overwhelming evidence that copper-coated zinc cents are unsightly, waste everyone's money, and pose an ongoing health and safety threat.

Would you carry old, leaking non-alkaline batteries around in your pocket -- or your bare hands? No? Then why are you perfectly content to accept rotting zinc cents, which are oozing the same toxic and irritating ionic-zinc compounds?

 

How would I pay it? Well with the 7% sales tax we have here that would make it $2.118 or $2.12 which would round to $2.10 so I'd use two dollars and a dime (or maybe two nickels.)

 

I agree with Gilbert.

And I would add the nickel. It costs too much to produce (.08?) and we don't need it. I am against creating a clad nickel.
Dimes and quarters are all we need. The current amount of pennies and nickels in circulation would last 100 years.
On the $1.98 example, you wouldn't lose 2 cents in the long run because your $2.02 purchase would round down to $2.00

 

You'll be quite a hit when you roll that drum into the bank one day.

 

I highly doubt that, Corporate America is not going to giving away money. They would make it to where your total would never be that amount. Your 1.99 now becomes 2.00, your 2.05 now becomes 2.10

 

Can't get rid of the cent and nickel but keep the dime and quarter, because then you can't always make change correct to within five cents. Better to move to dimes and halves, again with size adjustments.

But good luck getting people to give up their quarters.

 

That's not the way it works now with gasoline purchases.

 

Because we have pennies now lol.... that's what the whole thread is about

 

This system only works if all money went digital. I think that would be a very bad idea, but not for us silver and gold stackers

 

As has been said many times before, the mint is an extremely profitable government agency and any loss from the cent is more more than made up for by the profits of other coins, especially the quarter. When I toured the Denver mint last year, the tour guide told our group that the nickel actually loses more money than the cent. He added that the focus on the cent derives mainly from sensationalistic media stories that don't tell the whole story. In any case, as long as the mint stays very profitable, there isn't really any pressure to dump the cent, at least internally.

Coins may turn into bits before the cent disappears. This hasn't happened yet, and may not happen for some time, but the digitization of money has really taken hold and will likely continue to do so. Of course entire sections of the economy still work exclusively with cash, so something will have to happen there before physical money vanishes (if it actually ever completely vanishes, it may just diminish). But for now, eliminating the cent appears to be a pretty low priority.

Of course one never knows what will happen in interesting times...

 

I never plan on moving it. It will be someone else's gain monetarily, but pain to deal with.

 

Gasoline is priced in fractional cents. Even if it weren't, it's dispensed as a continuous quantity (actually digitized to the nearest 1/1000 of a gallon on the pumps I use), so your actual total price always includes some fraction of a cent. This gets rounded to the nearest cent, not "rounded up always".

Sales tax and interest accrual also generate fractional cents. These cents get rounded fairly, not "always up" or "always down", and in fact there are laws to enforce that.

Of course, nobody cares about single-cent amounts, because each one is trivial -- they only add up over many transactions. My point is that dime amounts are now just as trivial as one-cent amounts were when laws like these were first established.

When the US discontinued the half-cent coin in the 1800s, its buying power was equivalent to something like 10 or 15 cents today. We are collectively wasting our time and money by keeping track of nickel-level amounts.

We're overdue for coin reform. I kind of doubt, though, that it'll ever happen; before we muster the political will to acknowledge the dollar's devaluation and give up small change, we'll give up on cash completely. Computers are perfectly happy to account for cents, or even smaller increments.

 

Yeah I highly doubt it too because quite frankly, if were honest here, our Government has a lot more precedent issues to worry about.

 

Or we could keep the cent and change its composition to plastic - similar to some of the old sales tax tokens.

 

Of course, "this is trivial and irrelevant" has never stopped them from spending time on issues in the past...

 

What will eventually kill the cent as we know it is when it eventually contains more than 1 cent worth of zinc. Then they will be melted and recycled at a profit, and it won't matter whether it's legal or not. Happened with silver coins in the 60's. Inflation will bring this about; just a matter of when. Doubt that plastic pennies would be acceptable.

Recently visited Australia. Items are priced to the penny. If paying in cash, total is rounded to nearest 5 cents. No one minds. It works.

Cal