Huh. DJT makes a decision that is actually a good idea.
You could knock me over with a feather.
It didn’t entirely occur to me that this could be done by executive order. But the Mint is an executive department, so why not? It isn’t banning the penny or anything. They’ll just stop producing it and everything will sort itself out over time.
There are people who have been collecting older pennies with scrap value over a couple cents for years in anticipation of the day the government makes it legal to melt them down.
It is an idea that is well past due. I am sick to my stomach this guy will get credit for it.
A large part of the reason it hasn’t been done is because of lobbying by a group called Americans for Common Cents that is funded largely by the zinc industry. All pennies made since 1982 have been composed of zinc slugs plated with copper. Even doing that and the damn things STILL cost more to produce than the value of the coin. By a lot. They currently cost 2.72 cents to manufacture.
It’s time for the penny to go.
Ha, that’s exactly what I was going to say! Even a broken clock is right twice a day, right? But then it explodes and the firestorm takes out your house and a good part of the neighborhood. Oh well, at least we’ll save the cost of minting pennies in the meantime. Please do nickels next!
Come back, zinc, come back!
FWIW, The US mint produced half as many pennies in Biden’s last year in office (3.2 billion) than it did in Trump’s last year (7.5 billion).
I was thinking of blind pigs finding acorns myself.
Heh… I found a mistake in this US Mint report when trying to look up these figures. I’m looking here:
https://www.usmint.gov/content/dam/usmint/reports/2024-annual-report.pdf
According to their production table, total seigniorage (face value of coins minus production cost) of the penny was -$85M and -$18M for the nickel in 2024. But this chart shows the opposite:
It looks like the penny and the nickel on the chart are reversed. Anyway, even though Biden produced fewer pennies in 2024 than Trump did in 2020, they lost more money–$85M vs. $62M. The cost of a penny is now actually 3.7 cents! And over 3 cents even if you exclude admin costs.
Both the penny and nickel have had negative seigniorage for the past decade. Delete them both.
While it’s a good idea to get rid of pennies; it’s not a good idea to get rid of them by simply stop manufacturing them. How do you expect businesses to deal with this? For example simply pricing products in nickel increments doesn’t solve the problem because of sales taxes–which are in penny increments. (While California allows rounding to the nearest nickel it is an exception.). So you need legislation to deal with this issue.
By pricing things appropriately there won’t be so much need for pennies - with a 6% tax rate, if I price my product at 94¢ it comes out to $1 with tax; no pennies needed. If people get a lot less pennies in their change then there are a lot less pennies going into a jar at their homes at night when they empty their pockets & a lot less pennies out of circulation; therefore, the existing ones should remain in circulation longer because they aren’t really circulating.
Leave it to the USA to solve a currency denomination issue by letting millions of merchants figure out a coin shortage.
FYI, Congress passes laws that mandate the production of coins, so no, he can’t do this unilaterally. And the cost of producing and distributing pennies is 3.69 cents per, so substantially more than face value.
I wonder about merchants re-pricing things to account for the absence of pennies. I doubt the resulting prices would be lower.
People buy more than one item at a time. $0.94 with 6% tax is actually 99.64 cents. So, if I buy ten, the total will come to $9.96. Unless the store prices things in increments of 94.339622642 cents (or equivalent at another sales tax rate), at some point someone is going to owe someone a penny.
It’s easy enough to abolish pennies (no one here has any regrets about doing it), but it does need to be permissible to round final prices to match available currency.
Good luck finding a combined sales tax rate with a whole number or one that doesn’t fluctuate at least annually. The easiest solution is to allow venders to build the estimated tax into their advertised price and let the bookkeepers deal with it.
ETTTTTS: Every Thing Trump Touches Turns To Shit.
Even when he tries to implement an idea that lots of people think is good, he naturally does it in a way that is illegal and, if it actually happens at all, will cause chaos and unnecessary trouble that would have been avoided if it had been done the right way.
A perfect summation.
It even fits on a personalized license plate in most states.
As I said upthread, I believe retailers will round individual items up as opposed to keeping prices the same & rounding your total to the nearest nickel. Think how many items a grocery store sells in a day; 2¢ more profit per item would be a windfall to their bottom line.
Huh? I don’t remember my state changing the sales tax rate at least in my purchasing lifetime. Even the big city that now has a extra 2% sales tax went to 1% somewhere around 1990 (definitely by '91) & then an additional 1% somewhere after that, so 2 changes in roughly 35 years.
I pay sales tax in 34 states and tens of thousands of tax districts. The applicable (combined) sales tax rate in any given locale rarely has just a zero after the decimal point. Tax hikes of a whole percent are hard to get passed, but .025% or .0333% to pay for a new park or upgraded traffic lights? Easy peasy.