Try saying "homophones" in your speech-to-text program and see what you come up with. Could be interesting.
Much the same thing that gas stations do now when they want to price gas at $1.999 per gallon. Everyone seems to think that there'll be a great ripoff based on rounding -- that, if you go to the store and buy 100 items priced at 18 cents each, the merchant will round each up to 20 cents, and you'll be charged 20 dollars. That's not going to happen. How many cash transactions does the average person make in a day, anyhow? Even if I go out to lunch and dinner, hit two grocery stores, and fill my gas tank, that's still only five transactions. Even if merchants always round up to the nearest nickel, I'm out a maximum of 20 cents per day. Maybe my affluence is showing, but 20 cents a day is not a big deal. And, in reality, merchants would almost certainly round to the nearest nickel (up or down), which means that on average I'd come out even. Frankly, I think we've reached the point where even dimes aren't worth bothering with. I'd be happy making the quarter the lowest denomination. But it doesn't matter what I think. We'll continue spending more money making and handling small coins than they're worth, until electronic money finishes taking over and the government abandons cash entirely.
Don't think rounding can't add up into big bucks: race tracks have made a fortune rounding off parimutuel payoffs to the lowest dime. In other words, a win bet that pays $6.68 is rounded down to a $6.60 payout. The track keeps the 8 cents. It all adds up in a hurry. And it is legal.
You bet it does. A convenience store or liquor store in Arkansas collects a special one cent tax on beer. That one cent tax amounts to 8.75 million dollars a year. There is also a one cent tax applied to motel rooms, a so called tourism tax. It amounts to over 13 million a year. So what would be more beneficial to the public, doing away with one cent and make taxes five cents or keep a penny that cost 1.7 cents to make but last an average of thirty years. A dollar bills average lifespan is eighteen months.
I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. Based on a bit of Google searching, I don't see a one-cent tax on beer for Arkansas; instead, I see a 3% off-premises tax and a 10% on-premises tax. Assuming you pay around $5.99 for a six-pack, your total price with the 3% tax would be $6.17. But if you buy $20 worth of other groceries as well, rounding will only happen on your total bill for the transaction. Stores will not separately round up the tax on each item, any more than a gas station separately rounds up the "2.05 9/10" price on each individual gallon you pump. Your "one cent tax on motel rooms" is actually a 2% tax. Unless your room costs 50 cents to rent (like the old song says), your tax will be more than one cent. A more plausible nightly rate is $40; a 2% tax on that would be 80 cents a night. Abolishing the one-cent coin, or even the nickel or dime, will have no impact at all on tax rates, any more than the lack of a quarter-cent coin has an impact on my local 7.75% sales tax rate. The rate is applied to total transaction amounts, and rounding is done only to the final total charge.
This has been explained numerous times here on CT. It's no use. There are people here that refuse to believe the truth about rounding no matter how hard and how long you beat them with the stick.
That 3 percent tax is two taxes combined. The point I was trying to make, and apparently went over heads, is how fast one cent adds up. So you can afford to throw away a quarter a day, with an estimated US population of 322.5 million, if everyone did that it would amount to over $80 million a day.
The US Mint is NOT "funded" by US Tax Dollars. It is the ONLY Federal Government operation that produces a profit which then gets dumped into the General Fund. $272 Million in 2014. And where did this "6 cents to make 1 cent" come from? The video clearly states 1.7 cents to manufacture 1 cent.
And I'm not so sure why his point was so hard to understand; even if wrong about the taxes, he was simply making a point of how even a single cent charged here and there can add up.
And he is totally ignorant of how rounding works. I don't know why the facts are so hard for some to grasp. I learned this in middle school math class. If the total ends in 1 or 2 cents or 6 or 7 cents, that total is rounded down to the lower multiple of 5 cents. If the total ends in 3 or 4 cents or 8 or 9 cents, that total is rounded up to the higher multiple of 5 cents. Half of all sales will be rounded up, the other half will be rounded down. There is no monster profit for anyone in the rounding process.
You seem to be arguing that that extra $80 million a day will somehow disappear, or that "we" will always lose it to some nebulous "they" who will round unfairly to suck "our" ghostly pennies into "their" pockets. (Is a small business owner "us" or "them"?) Rounding leads to little or no advantage for either party over time if it's done fairly. Market forces will work against any party that tries to do it unfairly, if anyone cares -- and, like gas billing today, it's possible that most people won't care. (Do you always check your gas receipt to see whether they're rounding the fractional cents up, down, or fairly?)