Poll of the Day > Trump orders the US Treasury to stop making the penny

(+) Yeah! (+)

adjl posted...

Pennies have a bad habit of kind of removing themselves from circulation. Retailers need to stock them to be able to give change, but when people get them, they tend to end up just accumulating in change jars and other such places because they aren't worth enough to carry them around and it takes a very long time to amass enough to justify a trip to a bank to deposit them.

Even beyond that, you have all the people who treat them like they're worthless and just toss them on the ground or in the trash. I've seen people do that and I just shake my head.

Meanwhile I'm picking up every penny I see. Because my weird OCD forces me to do it for "luck" (even though I don't actually believe in luck).

I read an article recently that said something like $70 million in change gets thrown out every year. That just seems crazy when you think about it.



adjl posted...

even if the plan is to destroy the pennies instead of trying to store them long-term in some manner of vault.

Presumably they'd be melted down and repurposed. Copper and zinc are both valuable, and there are ways to separate metals (or potentially just mix them together into brass). The biggest problem would be having to sort them by year, because different coins from different time periods have significantly different proportions. A penny minted last year is mostly just zinc with a copper coating (which you can actually see if you ever cut one in half). But most pre-1980 coins are a vast majority amount of copper.

If you could get a roughly equal number of older pennies and newer ones, you'd probably be pretty close to the proportions you'd need to smelt fairly usable brass (though you might need to add extra copper, because it's likely in any buyback you'd get way more newer coins than older ones).

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/7e3f4ec0.jpg

adjl posted...

Nobody's stopping you from keeping some around if you want, but when tens of millions of dollars are being wasted every year producing currency that really isn't actually useful, that's kind of a problem.

Fair. Looks like we're also losing money on nickels. We should prob do away with them, too.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Even beyond that, you have all the people who treat them like they're worthless and just toss them on the ground or in the trash. I've seen people do that and I just shake my head.

They are pretty worthless, at least for people that aren't in a position where they need to obsessively hoard every cent they can. On the rare occasion that I use cash for anything, I rarely use anything smaller than a loonie, and virtually never use anything smaller than a quarter unless I just happen to be carrying exact change. I'll let change accumulate in my wallet until I've got more than like 10 coins total, then take out all the small change and stick it in a pile or bag that accumulates. Every few years, I'll actually deposit it, and I don't think I've ever seen it add up to more than $20-30, which is barely worth the effort unless I'm already heading to the bank. Even then, the vast majority of that is loonies and toonies, with a lesser portion being quarters. It's rare for dimes and nickels to add up to more than a dollar, and pennies would amount to even less if they were still in the mix.

Now, if I used cash more often, I'd accumulate change faster and there might be something more worthwhile there, but even so we're not exactly talking about a significant amount of money. The majority of it would still come from larger change and pennies would be a negligible portion of it. For pennies alone to add up to enough that the trip to the bank would actually be worth the time would take decades.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Presumably they'd be melted down and repurposed. Copper and zinc are both valuable, and there are ways to separate metals (or potentially just mix them together into brass).

Presumably, but that's not a trivial ask either. It's proving surprisingly difficult to find data on this, but from what I can dig up, the US exports about 200-250 million pounds of brass per year, or about 100 million kg. Throwing an extra 60 million kg of pennies into the mix to be melted (which, remember, is just a tenth of what's out there) would be a non-trivial strain on that industry, and it wouldn't be worthwhile to build additional capacity to handle that strain because it'll be over relatively quickly.

beefcake71090 posted...

Fair. Looks like we're also losing money on nickels. We should prob do away with them, too.

Honestly, I'm in favour of ditching anything smaller than a quarter. Even quarters are arguably unnecessary, but you do lose a lot of granularity at lower price scales if you don't have them (like the difference between paying $3 for a croissant and $3.50 is actually significant for both the customer and the bakery), so I think they should probably stick around. I don't have any exact figures on how much it costs to keep nickels, dimes, and quarters in circulation, so I can't state with as much certainty how much financial sense it makes to kill them, but in terms of usefulness, I draw the line at quarters.

The US can't brag about being the first to abolish 1 cent coins, so **** it

JixHedgehog posted...

The US can't brag about being the first to abolish 1 cent coins, so **** it

Oh we will

Muscles posted...

You say that like inflation hasn't also fucked this country and many others, we should try to get to a point where the dollar is the strongest and stay there without inflation or deflation, and right now we are too inflated.

What are you talking about even?

Inflation is a natural occurring event in economics. You know how your grandparents talk about how bread used.to cost a nickel in their day, and now it doesn't? That's inflation. The goal is to keep the inflation rate low, but it can't really be stopped. What the world experienced due to Covid was a sharp increase in inflation prices, but much of what we are seeing are artificially increased prices under the guise of inflation, aka greedflation.

But in general, prices from inflation don't return to pre-inflation values.

shadowsword87 posted...

This isn't within the power of the president.

Likely not. But I doubt this will be challenged, since no.one cares, and drowing in all the other illegal orders occurring.