And as Colibri noted, the cent was theoretically divided into 10 mill(e)s. (Some tax assessments are still made in mills, though there were never mill coins.) And it was once proposed that, consistent with this decimal system, the next step up from the eagle be the “union” (10 gold eagles = 1 large gold union). So we sort of almost had a six-unit, three-metal system.
The American di(s)me is a unit unto itself. A “nickel,” on the other hand, is just a five-cent piece, a denomination.
This gives me an opportunity to advance my solution to the “penny problem”: let the dime be our smallest unit. Just drop “cents,” or render them theoretical, like mills.
Some have advocated ending minting of the cent but maintaining “nickels” and rounding off all sums to the nearest five cents. This leads to to the perception that somebody is being stiffed a little on each transaction, and it just feels conceptually awkward to have a system in which an actual denomination is a multiple of a theoretical unit (imagine if your pocket change all these years had included five-mill coins). Abandoning physical cents entirely (including the five-cent piece), on the other hand, is a recalibration of the scale to a new unit. Pricing in dollars and dimes is no more “rounding” than present pricing in dollars and cents.
I like this idea. Further, let’s retire the dollar bill once and for all, have the Mint start minting a dollar coin and stick with it, popular opinion be damned. I don’t know how much oney that would save (as I’ve heard more than once that pennies actually cost the government money and that a dollar coin makes a bigger profit for the government than a dollar bill), but it’s probably a lot.
No, I meant pies: there were 3 pies to 1 paisa, though the postage stamps that I have in my collection, and the coins that I saw in India in 1955, were in pies and annas, not in paisa.
The dime is actually a very old coin in the US, dating back to the founding. In fact, before the introduction of nickels, that was another coin worth five cents called the half-dime.
How about if they went to polymer notes? That’s also supposed to be a cost savings, as they are more expensive to print, but make up for that in durability. And you don’t wind up with $4 worth of coins in your pocket. I suspect they’d have to change some of the BEP tests, such as the infamous crumple test, but that’s not unreasonable.
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And if we rounded off to dimes, we’d have a bit of a problem with quarters, which don’t come out even, and are a popular coin. Maybe it’s time to quit using denominations meant to be consistent with the old Spanish dollar (8 real), and issue 20 cent / 50 cent coins. But that would give people even more to carp about.
We already have half dollars, nothing wrong with 'em.
With dimes as the bottom of the scale, a two dime (not 20 cents) coin makes sense; that’s what you’d issue if you were starting from scratch.
But we already have billions of quarters out there, and they are popular. Cutting off quarters would be problematic, if nothing else for the hundreds of thousands of laundry and vending and car-wash and newspaper and game machines that take only quarters.
So keep minting quarters after dropping cents and five-cents, at least until everybody has adjusted to the first shift and most of the small coins have left circulation at a natural rate. One quarter doesn’t break evenly into dimes, but two quarters do; for most purposes (other than the machines) they’d effectively be half dollars in two pieces. Coupled with a cessation of $1 bills, this transition will make half-dollar and dollar coins vastly more popular ($4 worth of these and dimes is a much nicer pocketful than a typical mix of the current line), and new machines will be expected to accept those coins as well as, or instead of, quarters.
I disagree. All of the problems that you mention wouldn’t happen if you dropped pennies but kept nickels. Also, rounding is clearer with nickels. If I buy something from you and the price after tax is $.65, then do I owe you 6 dimes or 7? That’s a 10-cent swing. With nickels, the most you’re going to lose to rounding is 2 cents. I’ll bend over to pick up a dime but not 2 pennies. [/hijack]
