Posted on 02/16/2012 5:29:40 PM PST by perfect stranger
The U.S. Mint is facing a problem -- especially during these penny-pinching times. It turns out it costs more to make pennies and nickels than the coins are worth.
And because of that, the Obama administration this week asked Congress for permission to change the mix of metal that goes to make pennies and nickels, an expensive recipe that has remained unchanged for more than 30 years.
....
Just the administrative cost of minting 4.3 billion pennies costs almost a half-cent per coin by itself, leaving precious little room to make a penny for less than a cent, no matter the raw material used.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
The dime will be the smallest denomination, and prices will be written with only one decimal place.
How would that work out?
Agree. You can’t buy anything for less than a dime anyway.
Typical political bull$hit. Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.
You can’t make this stuff up - administrative costs?
The value of the currency has eroded to the point that we can't afford to mint coins even in the cheap metals we currently use. So now we have to find even cheaper metals with which to denominate the ever-cheaper currency they represent.
Or, we could stop devaluing the dollar.
We also need to do away with the short lived 1 and 5 dollar bills (the bills life span of a few months make them expensive). The Canadians figured out how make do with 1 and 5 dollar coins. What is about our government that they can’t make simple cost effective changes to our coinage?
How about making them of plastic? Or paper? Or getting rid of all coins save the dollar? Like Mexico’s coins made of Aluminum
Would anyone say 2 decs?
Would anyone say 2 decs?
Would anyone say 2 decs?
I mean .. a tattoo made with invisable ink or something that could be scanned at the store?
Or maybe a micro-chip implanted in/under the skin?
Just a (frightening) thought.
This is not a laughing matter. The Roman Empire did the same thing, debased the currency by over spending (they too paid farmers govt subsidies to not grow grapes in order to keep the price of wine high) till at the end what were once pure gold and silver coins contained about .4% of those precious metals.
It’s one more glaring sign of our impending collapse.
Too many groups and individuals slopping at the public trough.
Hech hem.. choke.. I happen to *ouch* that I agree *barf* with him. Nickels are worth more by weight than they are worth..
We would still say 20 cents, but the decimal point would move to the right.
If every transaction ended with a zero, that’s a good reason to drop the zero.
Third world countries that debase their currency periodically drop a couple of decimal places and re-issue “new” pesos or “new” dollars.
When your coinage isn’t worth coining, when your dime stores are now dollar stores, when $33 dollar ounces of gold are now worth $2000, its time to hit reset.
I’m a huge proponent of plastic. Someday everything will be made of it. I never ask for paper bags:) And it’s easy to produce out of stuff that is almost worthless. Counterfeiting it would be no less difficult as well. In short, I have no problem with plastic money (a slightly different take on what is currently known as credit cards).
As if one needs proof of the debasement of the currency; this is it. The underlying metal is worth more than the printed face value.
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