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The dime is currently worth less than the halfpenny was when it stopped being minted because it wasn't useful to do so anymore.
This is wildly overdue, and honestly, probably not far enough.
Thanks CGP Grey. You keep moving them goalposts.
Just like how the federal minimum wage needs to be over 22 dollars, not just Fif-Teen bucks an hour
...what?
CGP Grey is a youtuber who made a video years ago about stopping printing the penny. when trump announced ending printing the penny, he made basically the same video about stopping printing the nickel, and the dime.
Due to Inflation.
The same reason that Bernie sanders pushed for a $15/h minimum wage, which should itself be inflated from its 2016 amount to 22 bucks an hour.
While I think both of you are making reasonable arguments, I wanted to make fun of the situation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58SrtQNt4YE < kill nickels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U < Kill pennies
Sure, I mean, I'm also all for raising the minimum wage, as it's wildly stagnated against inflation. You can be for that and for getting rid of the penny?
Idk, I just don't understand how I'm "moving the goalposts"? Or perhaps I've just misunderstood the point of your comment.
I actually have seen that CGP Grey video before though, and it's only gotten more relevant as time has gone on, lol. It doesn't make it bad policy just because Trump is the one doing it.
CGP Grey made the video for "get rid of the penny". When they got rid of the penny, he made the video "get rid of the nickel, and the dime." When the original goal as getting rid of the penny, once that was achieved, he moved the goalposts to get rid of the nickel.
Your statement is in line with CGP Grey's (correct) viewpoint.
Pointing this out in a facetious manner is meant to be humorous.
It's not bad policy because Trump is doing it. The rationale is sound. The bad part of it is zero guidance was given on how cash businesses (virtually all brick and mortar business) are expected to handle the inability to make exact change in the absence of available pennies, leaving them all to figure it out for themselves.
im more wondering about banks. what happens if I want to withdraw a dollar and one cent. businesses can just adjust their pricing.
Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I'm fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.
It's not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It'd be a weird and unwise decision, but it's certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your "actual total" came out to $1.48, that's absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.
It'll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that'll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.
You have to remember, they're not going out and stealing all the pennies. They're just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn't an overnight process.
You can't just round to the nearest 5¢. Round up, and you end up pissing people off for overcharging them. Round down, and you end up losing money on every sale, which adds up over time with hundreds or thousands of transactions a day.
The grocery stores around me put up signs a month ago asking people to pay in exact change when using cash due to the penny shortage. Without stores able to get more pennies from the banks, this will become a problem in months, not years.
Businesses already round to the nearest cent all the time. Any time an odd number is part of a 50% off sale, or any time you charge sales tax. The fractions of a cent are too small to matter, and we've gotten to the point where the pennies are too small to matter.
You say people will be pissed if you round up, but stores have been slowly increasing prices by dollars for the past few years and haven't lost a customer over it. A few cents of rounding isn't going to drive your customer base away. Especially if all the other stores are doing it too.
And just think for a moment. Let's say the store starts losing 4¢/transaction. The truly worst case where they always floor in favor of the customer. First, they could offset this by just blanket raising the base price of everything by 5¢ and no one would bat an eye, but let's set that aside for now.
Let's say a store does 10k transactions a day. Feels like a good average for a large sized store. That's a theoretical max loss of $400 a day. If the average grocery store customer is spending around $50, that's $500k of revenue per day for the store that just lost $400. I think that's pretty safely in the slush. Hell, they probably lose more than that per day on shrinkage alone. And they saved way more than that when they replaced all the cashier's with kiosks, and I didn't see any of those savings passed on to me.
No business is gonna fold over a 4¢/transaction loss. It's a negligible impact on your overall overhead. And even if it wasn't, the small bump in base price you would need to cover it is so small as to not register with your customer base.
Isn't a halfpenny worth half a penny so a dime is worth twenty times more?
One dollar in 1950 had far more buying power than one dollar does now. Something that cost a dollar in 1950 would cost nearly $14 in 2026.
The halfpenny, when discontinued, could purchase roughly as much as 12¢ could today.
At that time, it was decided that a halfpenny wasn't necessary, as transactions were of a high enough value that made tracking the numbers to the half-penny needless, and that you could just round to the nearest penny.
The equivalent today would be rounding to either the nearest dime or quarter, eliminating the need for smaller denomination coins.
Please, this is MAGA America, of course it's a scam. Your post is exactly why we should keep the penny.
There are many, many very wealthy people and corporations out there, and they keep track of every single fucking penny they touch, and they go to War if a single penny is missing. As an example, here you are figuring out the purchasing power of some anachronistic currency that hasn't been used in 200 years to justify it.
Those same people are now telling us that we, the working people, don't need to keep track of every one of OUR pennies, because we don't have enough of them to worry about. Don't worry, all their cash registers will do the calculations for you, and it will always be fair. We'll never round UP the numbers so you always end up paying a few cents more for EVERYTHING. It won't make a difference to you and your few pennies, but they will add up, and make the rich even richer by taking your pennies directly out of your pocket, a penny at a time. What are you complaining about? It's just a penny.
But it's my penny, and I want it, and before you call me a cheapskate, I'll remind the world that those calling me a cheapskate are the ones trying to take MY penny away. If it's important enough for them to take it from me, then it's important enough to defend it from them. I'm not giving these Jackals one inch.
Of course, the way around it is to use your debit card for everything, and your purchases will be calculated to the penny. And they will also be able to track every item you purchase, and where you are at any given moment, and every place you've been.
So should we bring back the halfpenny? Cause right now they're scamming you out of all those fractional pennies you could be saving, and that really adds up. They're up charging you 0.5¢ all the time, and robbing those halfpennies right out of your pocket!!!
But if you're not for bringing back tracking transactions down to the fractional cent, what makes it different to your mind? Why is that ridiculous, but rounding to the nearest 5¢ is way out of bounds?
Typical bonehead take.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at - we should bring back the Halfpenney. Good job getting the point, Brainiac.
I wasn't saying I thought that was your actual position. I was saying that your actual position made as much sense as that.
There's no difference in kind between rounding to the nearest penny or rounding to the nearest nickel. It's the exact same thing, and the question is just "where do you draw the line"?
So should the line never change no matter what? Regardless of any real life implications the line is drawn exactly where it was meant to be by God at the beginning of time and it is devoid of context or reason?
If we had massive deflation to the point where tracking to the fractional cent made sense, I would argue that it might be worth printing halfpennies again. But we don't. And the idea that companies are going to be robbing you of pennies is no more or less reasonable than the idea that they are robbing you of fractional pennies.
Hell, there's a real chance it'll go the other way in a lot of cases, as stores will start marking things as $X.95 instead of $X.99. Someone else did the math based on what economists projected the cost to consumers would be, and it came out to 2¢ per person per year. Not exactly a staggering number.
The fact of the matter is that we have to occasionally re-figure at what granularity it's worth tracking our fractions of a dollar to. Inflation will always be inflating, and in a few hundred years when a loaf of bread is $250 the idea that we would track fractional dollars will seem as antiquated as the halfpenny does now.
A lot of words for a simple concept:
We need pennies because we figure everything to the penny. We don't need half pennies because nobody figures anything to the half cent.
The wealthy want their pennies, and I want mine, too. Any other concept is just those with the money trying to steal from the citizens, AGAIN.
But we used to figure everything to the half cent. That's my point. We stopped figuring it to the half cent when we got rid of the half cent coin.
In the same way, we would stop figuring things to the whole cent if we got rid of the penny.
As an example, let's say I wanted to buy an item that was $1.75, but it was 50% off. How much does that cost? In reality, it should be $0.875, but we don't track to the half penny, so we just call it 88¢.
Or, if you buy something for $1.50, but there's a sales tax of 3%, that item will be $1.545 after sales tax, but they just round it to $1.55.
They're already rounding your numbers up. That's already happening. The only reason it feels different is because we "don't track fractional pennies," which is only true because we got rid of the coins that allowed us to track fractional pennies.
If we got rid of the coins that let us track individual pennies, we would also stop tracking all exchanges to the individual penny, and simply round to the nearest 5¢.
Which, in many cases, could actually work in your favor, I might add. If you bought something and the total was 1.52, they would simply round it down to $1.50. Sales tax law varies state to state, but that it's how the vast majority of states handle fractional pennies already, so precident indicates it would be that way for rounding to the nearest 5¢. E.g. if sales tax is 2%, and you bought something for $1.19, that comes out to $1.2138, but most states round that to $1.21, saving you 0.38¢ (38 one hundredths of a cent).
I understand all of that, but for most of our nation's existence, we figured everything to the penny, and created the economic engine that pretty much rules the world, based on that penny. To suddenly change that, would be like saying we're going to get rid of the millimeter, and round up all measurements to the nearest centumeter, because it will be easier.
And like I keep saying, while we are dealing in nickels, the wealthy will still be dealing in pennies, and stealing all our rounded up pennies that we decided were too expensive, because they convinced ignorant dipshits like out president think it costs us 2.3 cents every time we use a penny.
I think it was Andrew Carnegie who said that rather than making a lot of money on a few big deals, it's better to make a small sliver off of something everybody uses. This is a perfect example. We see it as only a penny, but the Sociopathic Oligarchs know that a few rounded up pennies a day from every citizen, will add up to a massive fortune very quickly, and then it will just become normal revenue forever.
There's a reason this is happening during a Trump administration. We're being robbed, and we're just standing here while they stick their hands directly in our pockets.
The problem with your meter analogy is that the length that a meter is measuring isn't slowly shrinking. If, in 50 years, instead of my room being 5 meters across it was instead 50,000 meters across, then yeah, I'd probably recommend we start measuring rooms in kilometers. And whereas I would care if you told me my 5mx5m room was actually 4.5mx4.5m, I probably don't care that my 49999.5mx49999.5m room is missing that exact same half meter.
And think of it this way. If Walmart (or any other store) were to, instead of "stealing your extra pennies by rounding up to the nearest 5¢," simply raise the price of all your groceries by 2ish¢, would that change your buying habits? Would you suddenly refuse to buy your groceries or go drive to another store because they raised the cost by 2¢? Probably not. So, if that extra 2¢ was super meaningful to the bottom line, they could already steal it from you. They don't need the pretense of rounding.
This has been proposed for a long time, and it's been luck of the draw which administration chose to do it. You're letting your hatred of Trump make you jump through irrational hoops to try and justify why this has to be a bad thing, because they idea that it could possibly be good, even by purest luck, is a threat to your identity as a person.
Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just armchair phycologist-ing. But your stance isn't a reasonable one. If in the future an apple costs $5000 and we're still printing the penny, there's no logical framework for keeping the penny. It would take 500,000 pennies to buy an apple. You'd have to bring in a pallet of pennies to buy it. If you think we should keep printing the penny at that point, then I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye.
But if you do agree that once apples are $5000 a piece we can stop printing the penny because it has no use, then we're just arguing about where/when the line is to get rid of the penny, not that the line exists at all. And if that line exists, I think it's fairly obvious on its face that we're overdue.
When apples cost $5000, we'll talk.
The examples your are using are all distant future hypotheticals, and don't address the real issue, which is that while there has been talk about retiring the penny for many years, the ONLY reason that it is happening NOW, is because the MAGAs have figured out how to game this situation for their own advantage, almost certainly at our expense. It's the ONLY reason they do ANYTHING.
And I'm not saying that because I hate Trump and any other MAGA PedoCons, I'm saying it because it's true, and we ALL know it.
Brother, apples already cost over 60x what they did when the halfpenny was done away with. I think we're at the point where the discussion is warranted.
But really, there's a bigger problem here, and it's that you've let your hatred of the current administration blind you. You sound like the person who's saying that the only reason that the Democrats would do something good is because they're secretly using it as a front to harvest adrenochrome.
As hard as this may be for you to hear, there are still in fact bipartisan issues in this country that everyone, regardless of party, agrees with. Fewer every year for sure, in this increasingly tribalistic landscape, but they do in fact still exist, and this is one of them.
There's a list of things that we've had bipartisan support for under the Trump administration. Legislation to fight phone scammers. Legislation to lower drug prices. The First Step Act, that helped a lot of non-violent federal prisoners get released from prison and reintegrated into their communities. His work to push against TikTok and other Chinese state controlled information networks in the US.
These are all things that Democrats also support and are pushing for. These are all things that have been good that this administration has done.
Now, all that is wildly, and don't mis-hear this, WILDLY, overshadowed by the blatant evil, hate, cruelty, and corruption of this administration.
But if you're so caught up in the "everything the person on the other team does automatically has to be bad because they're wearing a red shirt instead of a blue shirt," mindset, you stop being a voice to consider seriously. You will throw all logic and reason to the wind because it's an attack against your identity to acknowledge that the other side can sometimes agree with you. It makes it where you have to imagine some sort of outlandish, deep state conspiracy to explain why the opposition is on your side about something, because you refuse to accept the obvious. Sometimes there are just issues that aren't terribly political and almost all semi-reasonable people just kind of agree on it.
You said that you're not against it because you hate MAGA. And maybe you're right. Maybe I've misread you. But it's clearly not true that we "all know it," as most people in this thread seem to disagree with you. And if you aren't automatically against everything from this administration just because of who they are, then you should be able to produce an example of something they've done that you support? I've given a list above, so feel free to pick from there. But are you willing to agree that the broken clock can indeed be right twice a day, or is the idea of saying that this administration did a single good thing too much of a threat to your identity?
It is a perfectly normal moral response to despise an administration whose core values are treason, greed, corruption, pedophilia, rape, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, incompetence, and ignorance. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging those FACTS, and making the decision to disbelieve that ANYTHING that comes out of this administration, and assume that ANYTHING they do is motivated almost primarily by either greed or cruelty.
Your list of positives is lame Drug prices lowered - on a handful of drugs. And we're supposed to thank them for giving us the bare minimum, their table scraps. They could lower the prices of all drugs, they could give Americans health care, etc., but let's give them credit for doing the bare minimum, as they take our health care away. The rest is more of the same. Trump Administration bipartisanship consists of MAGA threatening Schmuckie Schumer, and him folding. "See, the Democrats agree with us!"
MAGA is evil, and that evil corrupts everything it touches. I do not acknowledge that anything they've done is valid. I will not apologize for standing by that. Anyone who give any defense or support of MAGA is painted with the same brush.
And I think we've reached the impasse.
I agree with you that this administration is evil. We have the same opinion of them. We're on the same side in that regard. And I'm not even saying you're wrong to despise them. I agree that's normal and even right.
But when you decide to begin rejecting reality. When you start calling bad things good and good things bad. When you start ignoring the evidence of your own eyes and justifying conspiracy theories because your hatred is more important than the truth. That's when you lose me. And based on this thread, it seems like that's where you're losing most people. And hurting your own cause.
All I'm saying is that this administration is so beyond evil and normal, that I immediately reject EVERYTHING that they say or do, and I do it unapologetically. They will NEVER get the benefit of the doubt from me.
"Oh, I voted for Mr. Hitler because he'd be good for the economy. You can't blame all that Jew killing stuff on me." - German citizen, 1946
As far as I'm concerned, IF we ever take our country back, one of the first orders of business should to reverse literally EVERY piece of MAGA legislation or EOs. Then pass the right legislation to fix whatever they "fixed," because it's guaranteed that the only solution that was ever considered was the one that makes them all money.
Since you brought Hitler into this... Clearly it's never okay with Hitler. Terribly evil person. If you agree with Hitler on literally anything, you are complicit in the Holocaust.
Hitler loved dogs. Huge fan of them. He had three (well, one and Eva Braun had two). He let his dog sleep in the bed with him. Took it with him everywhere. He was a huge dog lover. Big fan.
Am I required to hate dogs because, by saying dogs are good, I'm agreeing with Hitler? It's clearly a terribly evil thing to agree with Hitler, right? So I think the only possible moral stance is to hate dogs with every fiber of your being? Isn't that right?
That's what your position feels like.
Now you're just being silly. Later, gator.
I mean, yes, it's the most extreme version of your position highlighting how ridiculous it is. The hope was that it would highlight to you how silly your reasoning was. If your ideology is predicated on doing the opposite of someone you hate, it requires you to take absolutely nonsensical positions.
But engaging with that requires self reflection, and that's hard.
But I'm game to call it here as well, if you like. Thanks for the debate. I've had fun. :)
Bottom line: The Sociopathic Oligarchs think pennies are important enough to take them away from us. If they want them so badly, I want mine, too. Those guys shouldn't get anything that the rest of us don't get, too.
Have a great week!
I assume testfactor means in economic value / purchasing power.
except im wondering how banks are going to handle this given congress did not act.
Probably the same way they handled the halfpenny being removed from circulation. There was no government fiat about it then.
But, luckily, they've got 20yrs minimum to figure it out. They've just stopped making new pennies. Coins are intended to last 20-30 years. It's not like they're going out and stealing everyone's pennies today.
I doubt it's a terribly difficult problem for them to solve over the next two to three decades.
half penny was removed by an act of congress so that it is no longer legal tender and was demontenized. The penny is just not being made by an executive order but a penny is still legal currency and banks have to follow laws around that.
A fair point. A better, more modern example is probably the two dollar bill. They'll just slowly be pulled out of circulation until they're no longer common.
I'm sure businesses will continue to accept pennies. They'll just start rounding to 5¢ regardless because they're uncommon, and if someone brings in 5 pennies, they'll take them, but eventually the federal reserve will have sucked all but a handful out of circulation.
Its not about bussinesses though. Its banks. They can't adjust withdrawals the way businesses do prices. The two dollar bill is not a good example because its not the bottom tier currency. Its not a common currency, heck I did not even realize they did not make them anymore but I can totally believe it. Thing is a bank can give someone two singles in the case of withdrawing two dollars. When the half penny was removed by congress you could not ask for anything less than a penny anymore. This is not the case with the fed just not producing the penny. So if I want to withdraw four cents in cash what does the bank do? I meant to mention this before but the lifespan of coinage means nothing if folks are hoarding it which is what is happening with the announcement the fed will just no longer produce it. Law requires the coinage be made as demand dictates and the executive is just saying there is no demand. This is actually increasing demand and banks will have to ask for pennies and likely the fed will just have to start making them again when the supply gets low. Its funny but this action by trump will actually cost the fed because they will end up having to make more pennies that will go into hoards that are worth less than the cost to make.
I hear what you're saying, but I don't know that I foresee this as more than a niche issue.
Obviously this is just a gut feeling backed by no data, so it's worth the paper it's printed on. But how many pennies were banks giving to non-business customers? I have to believe that it was super negligible.
The vast majority of pennies were issued to businesses to make change. If businesses stop giving out pennies, how many pennies will the banks be asked to hand out?
Time will tell for sure, but my gut is that the amount of people hoarding pennies will be wildly offset by businesses getting rid of them.
And, in your "what if I asked for only 4¢ from the bank" example. The easy solution is that they just give you a nickel and write the penny off as a loss. The penny is just so low value that it wouldn't add up to an appreciable loss. Again, that's gut, but the average bank brick-and-mortar does on the order of hundreds or thousands of transactions per day. If they lost 4¢/transaction, that's only on the order of tens of dollars per day. They lose more to that in miscounts I would imagine.
So they so do not lose money like that in miscounts I guarantee. It would be a massive amount. I don't know what will happen for sure but without congressional action im sure the banks will petition the fed for more pennies and if the executive still insists there is no demand it will just be another ingnore the law kind of thing.
Fair. We'll have to see how it plays out. My gut is that the demand probably won't be there, but we'll just have to see.
But to be clear, we're talking about a brick and mortar bank losing between $10-40 a day. Compared to the overall quantity of money moving through it, that feels like it should be negligible. That's, like, one to two tellers leaving an hour early.
But yeah, the way this should be done is through an act of Congress. Agreed on that. This should really be an easy piece of bipartisan legislation, and the fact that Congress is so broken as to be unable to pass it is a huge indictment in its own right.
well each branch losing some small amount per day every day year over year. things like this are very significant for businesses. walmart drove businesses into over seas manufacturing to save a few cents on multi dollar items.
People overstate that problem. They say "businesses" as if all businesses are the same.
Bank of America has 3600 branches in the US. At $20/day, that's $72k/day, or $26mil a year.
Bank of America has $3.5 trillion dollars in assets. If they're making 1% interest on that (they're making far more than that, I promise), they're making $35 billion dollars a year. So that $26mil makes up less than a tenth of a percent of their total revenue.
Compare that to the Walmart example. First, at Walmart people aren't just buying one thing. If my cart has 50 items in it, that's a few cents per item. So we're really talking fifty cents to a dollar per transaction. Second, Walmart has around 40 million customers per day. (About half of the total number of people who even have a Bank of America account, and we know that not even half of account holders are going to a brick and mortar every day.)
So, a savings of 1¢ per item is a difference of, conservatively (assuming an average cart size of 10 items), $4mil per day, or around $1.5 billion per year. Contrast with the around $26 million from Bank of America.
They just aren't comparable examples. At its core, the scale issue that you're outlining only matters if you're getting it on a huge number of relevant things it applies to. There just aren't that many actual cash transactions handled by BoA compared to its overall income numbers. Walmart has a huge number of individual items it sells vs it's overall income.
Yeah I still think its not as paltry for the business as you make it out to be. My prediction still is that banks say. Hey. We need pennies at some point (unless congress makes it official)