Should the US stop printing pennies?

Post Reply New Topic

I got to thinking about this after I got back from excursion to Australia and New Zealand a few weeks ago. We press so many of them, copper like most commodities has a price, and both of these commonwealths have their lowest denomination set at 5 cents. I have to wonder, considering raw materials, transportation, and print cost - how expensive is a penny compared to its store or value, $.01?

I realize that one thing is significantly different - both Aus and NZ have VAT, that's included in the main cost of an item and the price plus VAT is calculated to yield a rounded amount. We could technically do the same and if a company's sales and use taxes were remitted to the state I don't think a rounding error of 5 cents would cause that drastic effect. The only commercial challenge would be that all the stores who love to give $X.99 prices pretax on store items would need to go over to $X.95 - that is if the game is really that important to them. When looking at some of the stats online it supposedly costs $1.26 to print a penny, $7.70 to print a nickel, maybe it would be good to eliminate the penny, use its ingredients for the $.05 piece, and save $6.40 per coin printed?

What do you guys think though? How many tax dollars do you think it would save the US to drop its lowest rung denomination?

It would make sence to do so, but the penny is beloved so ittle never happen. I admit getting a little exited when i reach into my pockets and see a copper penny. Copper is a good looking metal.

Lol yeah! In New Zealand the one thing that shocked me all the time was that rounding up/down by 5 cents.

I think its a very nifty system.

http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/twelve.asp

Supposedly there are a little over 200,000,000,000 in circulation, that tells us how much is out there for maybe the last twenty-five or thirty years but not quite as much about yearly US mint budget.

http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0774850.html

supposedly in 1998 10,257,400,000 pennies were printed, 1,323,672,000 nickels. Not knowing the price then but just taking that as a hypothetical for this year:

10,257,400,000 x $1.26 = $12,924,324,000

yearly per citizen:
$12,924,324,000 / 300,000,000 - $43 per person (including much more than taxpayers

If pennies were removed and then swapped out nickles:

1,323,672,000 x (7.7 - 1.26) = $8,524,447,680

new total savings: $21,448,771,680

yearly per citizen:
$21,448,771,680 / 300,000,000 = $71.50 per person (again, including much more than taxpayers).


I guess its not quite a paycheck buster either way, after all the government does much worse things with our money often. Still, I can't help but think of what better things could be done with this kind of money every year.

We don't print pennies. We stamp them onto metal slugs.

ruveyn

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_copper_is_in_a_penny

Yeah, I saw that too a few minutes ago. Looks like it would have more impact on our zinc than anything.

Since inflation's gotten bad enough, the penny has become essentially useless. I remember when I was kid (I'm not that old, either), you used to be able to buy 1 cent candies at the convenience store. Nowadays, you can't buy anything for a penny... Their only purpose now is as change, because businesses like to charge $x.99 for everything (though there's economic/psychological reasons for that). The world would not collapse if the nickel became our new lowest monetary denomination.

The currency value of a penny is actually less than the cost to stamp it. Given that the cumulative effect of inflation over the past several centuries has diminished the penny to a negligible value, it should probably be dropped. Many other countries have periodically re-valued their currency when inflation resulted in the bottom denominations being worthless; we can stand to do this every century or so.

how about we stop printing all money?

We need some type of physical redunancy IMO, otherwise we're left too vulnerable. A good enough solar flare perhaps could leave us up a creek for financial records on anything or anyone if it all went paperless/electronic.

I agree. lets go back to using rocks&seashells.

In New Zealand, which a couple of years ago revalued again so that the lowest denomination is now 10 cents, the 10 cent piece is actually copper. So there's no reason to go without!

They also lightened all the coins, so that where NZ and Australia used to have identical small change, now the NZ 20 cent piece is much closer in size to the Australian 10 cent, and is much, much easier to carry in your wallet.

I find it really good, myself - I visited the US recently and was amazed by how much change I was forced to carry - whereas here you can use up your change fairly quickly, because you don't need so many coins to make up a usable sum of money.

The one difference that I'd like to keep though, I like our $1s being paper, having to carry $1s and $2s as coins made me want to keep piling it up in the hotel room and not use it - worked out okay as I needed it for laundry and internet but otherwise it would have been really annoying.

Hey, the less coins the better. Maybe while we're being radical, you guys could vary the size/shape of paper money so blind people can easily pick denominations? I like having different colours too, you never accidentally pick up the wrong one.

I think that the government had some plans to discontinue the $1 bill and replace it with the $1 coin and $2 bill. Granted, a coin is more expensive to make than paper money. However, coins are much more durable and remain in circulation longer. Thus, in the long run, coins are less expensive. Of course fewer and fewer transactions actually involve the transfer of either paper money or coinage any more.