Multiple sources are floating the idea of saving the US saving $179M a year minting the penny. It costs 3 cents to mint a 1 cent piece.

I'm not sure it's a viable idea.

My city taxes goods at a certain level, the city next door has a different rate and the county an overall different rate, not to mention all the other municipalities in the state. How do they structure pricing so the amount either rounds up or rounds down?

If there will be national uniformity, doesn't that take away or eliminate local taxing authority to be set as the locals see fit?

Great DOGE idea but I'm not sure how it really would work.

I don't believe it mathematically possible to structure all prices, after varying amounts of sales tax, to end with a 5 or a 0.

I've got $400 face value 800 rolls of 1983 dated rolls direct from fed reserve left over from a defunct grocery store. Bound to be a lot of copper cents and maybe some collector as they have yet to be sorted. Someday they may be worth separating the copper or maybe find a collector who would pay a premium to search for collectibles and sort the copper. A stash for hard times.

When this was floated before, the envisioned solution was to round the total for every cash transaction to the nearest $0.05. (That'd be the final total, after tax... So differing tax rates wouldn't factor into it.)

.01 and .02 rounds down to .00.
.03 and .04 rounds up to .05
.06 and .07 rounds down to .05
.08 and .09 rounds up to .10
Etc.

Sometimes the merchant comes out ahead by 1 or 2 cents. Sometimes the buyer comes out ahead by 1 or 2 cents. Either way, it's just 1 or 2 cents. And over the course of a bunch of transactions it should be a relative wash mathematically, losing some but gaining others.

Not sure if DOGE will come up with a different solution this time around.

I have thought this was doable for quite a while. Round tax tables where needed (states do this anyway).

Further, I think we should mint $1 coins and reduce or eventually do away with that paper denomination. Coins last something like 50 times longer. I'm sure someone here knows how much we'd save not printing the paper bills. If the pennies are gone, there is room in the cash register coin trays for the new $1 piece. As kids we had penny candy, now the candy is a buck!

quote:

Originally posted by preten2b:
Further, I think we should mint $1 coins and reduce or eventually do away with that paper denomination.

They tried that in 2000, with the introduction of those gold-colored dollar coins. The hope was that it would catch on and reduce the reliance on paper dollar bills.

It went over like a fart in church. Wildly unpopular, both with citizens as well as with merchants. (Especially vending machine companies that were faced with having to shell out money to refit all their machines to accept these new coins.)

It lasted barely a decade before they stopped minting them in 2011. They're still legal tender, but how often do you see these dollar coins being used nowadays, just 14 years later? Basically never.

^^^ understood and true. A part of that was retailers who didn't have register drawers to accommodate another coin. I'm not sure the size or shape was the best either, but a penny nor a dollar isn't worth what it was 25 years ago. Done together, is more interesting to me.

I would be fine if they did away with the penny coin. We could live without just fine and when it costs more to make than it's worth, it doesn't make any sense to keep doing it.

Seems like this would only need to apply to cash; electronic billing and payments could remain granular to the penny. Also card based payments (credit cards).

To avoid price fixing that would always result in rounding up taxes payable to gov, the policy should always work in the consumer's favor - all transactions should round down; nothing ever rounds up.

I wouldn't mind eliminating pennies. I don't think it would be adversely, financially speaking (personal finance; not sure about commercial and large institution / gov financials). I often just leave pennies in the 'take a penny' dish or tip jar. I don't like carrying coins. Whenever I go to cash oriented Japan, at the end of the day, I take out all the coins in my pocket and leave it on the hotel room table. Usually a nice pile of coins I leave on the table when I check out.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
When this was floated before, the envisioned solution was to round the total for every cash transaction to the nearest $0.05. (That'd be the final total, after tax... So differing tax rates wouldn't factor into it.)

.01 and .02 rounds down to .00.
.03 and .04 rounds up to .05
.06 and .07 rounds down to .05
.08 and .09 rounds up to .10
Etc.

Sometimes the merchant comes out ahead by 1 or 2 cents. Sometimes the buyer comes out ahead by 1 or 2 cents. Either way, it's just 1 or 2 cents. And over the course of a bunch of transactions it should be a relative wash mathematically, losing some but gaining others.

Not sure if DOGE will come up with a different solution this time around.

This is a clever way for retailers to jack up prices to hit the round up.

For instance, if a candy bar costs 90 cents, my local tax is 7.95% aka the total candy bar cost would be 90 cent plus 7 cents for 97 cents. That would round down to 95 cents.

But if they raise the price to 92 cents, with tax the price would round up to $1.

Just by raising the price by 2 cents, they pull in a nickel while paying while paying only 2 cents more in tax. If I'm a store I'll reprice everything to pocket that extra money.

No. I think eliminating the penny should be put off until we go to all digital currency.

And I hope that is not in my lifetime!

It will not be time to get rid of the penny until it is time to get rid of the dime.

1977 & 1978, I worked in Barcelona. Spanish coins, the peseta was worth just over 1¢ U.S.

There was usually a shortage of peseta coins. Sometimes, merchants or even banks, would substitute a book of matches, but that was a one-way transaction; you couldn't use matches to pay for anything.

Or simply stop all coins , except maybe the quarter.

Stationed in WEST Germany when Uncle Sam decided it was feasible to eliminate penny transactions at military facilities. You could spend your pennies, but no pennies returned, the round up/down was used. It worked.

The Half Cent coin was eliminated in 1857 and all is still good. The silver Half Dime was replaced by the nickel NIckel.

We are about 20 years past the useful life of the penny. Five cent increments are more than functional going forward.

I rarely pay with cash anymore and certainly don't carry pennies around. It's just a hassle to get them as change, collect them in a jar and take them to the bank. I'm in favor of elimination and rounding.

We just need to pause making them. Then spend a little money on a campaign to get them back into circulation. There's millions and millions of them out there, sitting in coffee mugs, mason jars, water cooler bottles, never to see the light of day again because it's too much bother to do so.

The people didn’t like the Susan B Anthony dollar coin. So they got pawned off on the Postal Service. People didn’t want em. We didn’t want the darn things either. The stamp machines in the lobbys didn’t like em either.