[appleskeptic]

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.

[jonawesomegreen]

We 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...

[StevePerkins]

Because 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.

[hiddencost]

You 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]

> 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

[JumpCrisscross]

> seems to lack respect for opposing political stances

This is true for issues with national currency. Pennies aren't in this category. Instead, it's more subject to the interest-group problem [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38665895

[schmookeeg]

Parent's model is very much my own view of our political gridlock.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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_Stat...

[noqc]

The "left" that you are referring to opposes eliminating cash. The reasons often given in hearsay and by journalists and blog posts are often exclusively focused on "people of color" who are underbanked, but the complaint is much more concisely stated as BEING OPPOSED TO THE PRIVITIZATION OF CURRENCY. Which seems fucking reasonable as shit to me.

[Guvante]

IIRC abolishing the penny is relatively popular.

The only reason it wasn't already abolished is lobbying by Zinc producers.

[appleskeptic]

What an indictment of our system.

[euroderf]

The way to fix underbanking is to get the USPS to offer low-cost/no-cost accounts.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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

[midasuni]

Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns and many things made of zinc.

[BenjiWiebe]

Aren'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]

It's a Simpsons reference :)

https://youtu.be/U1iCZpFMYd0?si=EHnRdnuKjoOvjuCP

[kalleboo]

Which itself is a reference to an old sponsored educational reel, made familiar by MST3K https://youtu.be/FkUVn0JiTz8

[volemo]

Penny 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]

"How was copper wire invented?"

"Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny."

[ThrowawayTestr]

That joke is a little different in every telling of it I've heard.

[nullhole]

No true Scotsman, I guess.

[noqc]

manufacturing costs are not just input costs. In fact, the ideal coinage the values ordered:

cost to manufacture > fiat value of coin > cost of materials

[shortrounddev2]

I 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

[dgacmu]

A penny costs 2.7 cents to make. We make almost 8 billion of them per year. That's $216 million per year for a money-losing nearly-useless coin. so, it costs you about a buck per year.

[__MatrixMan__]

Maybe 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]

One benefit of the banking industry's bias against the poor is that cash can never be eliminated in the US.

[appleskeptic]

Your 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]

That’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.

[appleskeptic]

A system that lets minor inefficiencies endlessly accumulate, because the activation energy to address them is too high, is rotten. As for picking up hundred dollar bills, Congress isn’t solving big problems either.

[jmye]

Hard disagree. The infrastructure act is a clear example of solving big problems.

It’s also neither here nor there - an implication that not solving a really, really small problem says anything about an ability or desire to solve bigger problems is clearly incorrect.

[krapp]

"I don't understand how other people can possibly care about things that don't affect me personally."

[shortrounddev2]

It doesn't seem to affect anyone directly at all

[dheera]

Even 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.

[lb1lf]

First 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]

Not 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).

[appleskeptic]

I’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]

Some places have free 15 minute parking, which seems like a better setup all-around.

[gkoberger]

Maybe 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?

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[appleskeptic]

I 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]

Dollar coins got phased in and out a couple times with no seeming issues.

[ghaff]

Well, 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]

> people don't mostly like them or use them

This is also true of pennies.

[ghaff]

Certainly. 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.

[ProjectArcturis]

Coinstar, specifically.

[ghaff]

I 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.

[paleface]

A 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]

A 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]

You’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]

We 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]

> a penny would actually have more value, than it does now.

That's literally deflation.

[bigstrat2003]

> Noone wants to get an annual 2 to 5 percent paycut...

I already get annual pay cuts thanks to inflation.

[bigstrat2003]

It would be too painful for people to have the currency lose all that value at once, but we certainly need to do something. Fiat currency has proven to be a horrible mistake.