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What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no sm
by appleskeptic 3y ago
What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).
Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.
- gkoberger 3y agoMaybe it's corruption, but my guess is it's just never been important enough to push through. Imagine all the work that would go into phasing out coins, both politically and logistically... all for what?
- appleskeptic 3y agoI imagine it would cost less than all the money collectively spent on minting them and buying and maintaining machinery to handle them. Even better if they got rid of the quarter too. But yeah, I can see why no politician has decided to make this their signature issue.
- galangalalgol 3y agoDollar coins got phased in and out a couple times with no seeming issues.
- ghaff 3y agoWell, I think the issue has been people don't mostly like them or use them. I don't know why the US is uniquely(?) in this stasis around the denomination of money in circulation. Of course, at this point, it's pretty academic. Pennies should have been gone decades ago. And it's still hit or miss to use anything above a $20 especially in a smaller store.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> people don't mostly like them or use them This is also true of pennies.
- ghaff 3y agoCertainly. Pre-COVID lots of places had little dishes near the register where people could toss one or two pennies in and take one or two out.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Maybe it's corruption It's not corruption. It's what I'll call the interest-group problem. Pennies are an issue a few people care deeply about and most people don't. It's electorally thrifty to accomodate those few, and so electeds do. It's an easy win, particularly in a partisan environment that punishes consensus building as betrayal of one's base. Put another way, keeping the penny won't piss anyone off enough to get one primaried. Killing the penny might.
- dheera 3y agoEven the quarter doesn't buy anything worthwhile. 10 minutes of parking, maybe? But that's about it. Keep the 50 cent and $1 pieces though. And $2 bills. I LOVE handing those to people who don't realize they are real.
- appleskeptic 3y agoI’ve always been fond of the 50 cent piece too. It’s too bad that the ubiquity of the quarter makes it the only contender for a single-coin system.
- bee_rider 3y agoSome places have free 15 minute parking, which seems like a better setup all-around.
- lb1lf 3y agoFirst time I went to the states (some 20 years ago), for some reason or other my local bank gave me a heap of $2 notes (also some $20 and $50 ones!) when I asked them for a few hundred dollars, just so I wouldn't have to worry about finding an ATM accepting my card at SFO. Didn't realize quite how uncommon they were until I tipped someone a couple of them and they angrily asked me for 'real money'!
- ghaff 3y agoNot that I use much cash but I haven't seen a $2 bill in the wild for a great many years. I could see how someone might be suspicious of them (even if only because they suspected they'd have trouble using them).
- volemo 3y agoPenny is worth less than the metal it’s made out of. coinnews.net/2022/01/18/penny-costs-2-1-cents-to-make-in-2021-nickel-costs-8-52-cents-us-mint-realizes-381-2m-in-seigniorage/
- nullhole 3y ago"How was copper wire invented?" "Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny."
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoThat joke is a little different in every telling of it I've heard.
- nullhole 3y agoNo true Scotsman, I guess.
- noqc 3y agomanufacturing costs are not just input costs. In fact, the ideal coinage the values ordered: cost to manufacture > fiat value of coin > cost of materials
- jonawesomegreen 3y agoWe dropped the penny in Canada in 2012 and I can’t say that I’ve missed it at all. Penny are still charged if your paying by bank or credit card, otherwise price is rounded to nearest 5c. > If the price ends in a one, two, six, or seven it gets rounded down to 0 or 5; and rounded up if it ends in three, four, eight or nine. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-penny-withdrawal-all-you-need-to-know-1.1174547 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-penny-withdrawal-all...
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoCoinstar, specifically.
- ghaff 3y agoI have a bunch of coins I really need to take there. On the rare occasion I get coins these days, they just get tossed in a bucket.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts It's the zinc lobby [1]. Maybe the solution is to mint a zinc quarter? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents
- midasuni 3y agoThank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns and many things made of zinc.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoAren't car batteries made out of lead, handguns out of steel, and phones made out of plastic, fiberglass (PCBs), and random other assorted stuff? (Even gunmetal which used to be used instead of steel is listed as only 2-4% zinc)
- khrbrt 3y agoIt's a Simpsons reference :) https://youtu.be/U1iCZpFMYd0?si=EHnRdnuKjoOvjuCP https://youtu.be/U1iCZpFMYd0?si=EHnRdnuKjoOvjuCP
- kalleboo 3y agoWhich itself is a reference to an old sponsored educational reel, made familiar by MST3K https://youtu.be/FkUVn0JiTz8 https://youtu.be/FkUVn0JiTz8
- shortrounddev2 3y agoI don't understand how there's any advocacy behind abolishing units of currency. I literally never pay for anything with cash and so I never receive any change. I don't see how it's a daily nuisance for some people
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoMaybe you should start using cash sometimes. Even if you don't have a direct need to participate in the economy without letting the credit card companies know where you are at several points throughout the day, you probably benefit in indirect ways from the fact that such a thing is still possible. It's worth keeping cash around.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoOne benefit of the banking industry's bias against the poor is that cash can never be eliminated in the US.
- appleskeptic 3y agoYour perspective makes sense if you accept as good that massive political effort must be taken to do obviously good things against the wishes of special interest groups. But most people would think that the US Mint churning out worthless coins every year at the expense of citizens is an undesirable state of affairs. Wasting other people’s money is inherently despicable. Not that worthless coins are anywhere near the top of the list of bad and wasteful policies. But if we can’t even solve the obvious low-hanging fruit, we’re not solving those bigger problems either.
- jmye 3y agoThat’s a interesting opinion. It seems like saying if you won’t bother bending over to pick up a penny, how can anyone expect you to bend over and pick up a one hundred dollar bill - one is worth the effort and one isn’t. People regularly make efforts and propose laws to solve bigger issues - the issue isn’t effort as much as adversarial disagreement.
- StevePerkins 3y agoBecause the savings would be less than peanuts in the grand scheme of things that the government spends money on. Because the Left would be galvanized by a million blog posts and academic papers (basically the same thing these days), arguing that it's racist because people of color are more likely to be underbanked and use cash. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter. Because the Right would probably be galvanized too, by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter. It's so hard to make anything happen in U.S. politics today... eliminating pennies, nickels, and dimes wouldn't even make my Top-10,000 list of priorities.
- appleskeptic 3y agoWhat an indictment of our system.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off It would be about inflation. Just as only Nixon could go to China, it's probably only Republican initiative that can nix the penny--they could brand it as thriftiness. Unfortunately, zinc is mined in red states and districts [1]. A President would have to lead the charge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_mining_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
- hiddencost 3y agoYou have a really angry model of the politics in this country, and seem to lack respect for the political stances. It's quite easy to pass laws that no one cares about. Congress passed a law modernizing duck hunting permits. Maine was very happy.
- throwawaysugar 3y ago> You have a really angry model of the politics in this country, and seem to lack respect for the political stances. I'd argue politics in this country is angry and seems to lack respect for opposing political stances. I found the parent's post perfectly adequate
- paleface 3y agoA better idea, in my opinion, is rebasing the currency, to some form of standard like gold - and ceasing to print pretend money, that only results in currency deflation, and retail inflation.
- damiankennedy 3y agoA gold standard would lead to deflation. Noone wants to get an annual 2 to 5 percent paycut while paying interest on a mortgage on a house that goes down in value every year.
- paleface 3y agoYou’re going to have to clue me in, to what it would be deflating?! The word is like a decibel, in that it needs some reference marker… With the currency pegged to a standard, a penny would actually have more value, than it does now. I disagree on your mortgage point. The whole reason for rebasing to a standard, is to avoid those issues. Where I think the rub is for most people, is they’d have to disavow themselves of the notion, that a property should go up in value.
- FredPret 3y agoWe can't mine enough gold every year to keep up with the rest of the economy. To put it another way, if gold was money, there wouldn't be enough new money every year to buy all the stuff we come up in a year. By decreeing gold to be money and money to be gold, we would be interfering with the market in a major way: artificially giving the value of gold a massive boost and cutting the value of all other things.
- jetpackjoe 3y ago> a penny would actually have more value, than it does now. That's literally deflation.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago> Noone wants to get an annual 2 to 5 percent paycut... I already get annual pay cuts thanks to inflation.