[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

But...but...prices will rise to the nearest nickel and it'll hurt the poor the most! < /Luddites >

[theBuckwheat]

>>
Pity the poor penny!
<<

No, pity the poor citizen who was convinced by his government schooling and his banker that "wealth" and Federal Reserve fiat money are the same thing. Pity the poor person who works and saves only to have the dollar of his youth decline in purchasing power so it is now only only worth a nickel. Worse, pity the retired person who lends his hard-earned life's savings out so that he can have some income only to see the value of the money he is repaid in worth less and less each month.

Mourn the demise of the penny? No, far better to lament having a fiat money system that has a deliberate policy of a "targeted inflation rate" of 2%, which at times past has exceeded 20% of deliberate annual destruction of value.

Why do we put up with this system, which is owned by a private corporation (Attn Freepers: the US Federal Reserve is a private corporation, not a share of which is owned by the US Government) where a committee of unelected hyper-bureaucrats are given the authority to set the value of the US sovereign currency?

Google "federal reserve private corporation" yields 27 million hits. Read it for yourself.

[butternut_squash_bisque]

I have several of those 2ft tall 'bottle banks', where I've dumped my pocket change over the years.

The Coke bottle holds 8,990 pennies ($89.90 through the bank's coin counter) and the Rolling Rock bottle holds 8,990 dimes ($890.00) through the same counter. I have a Budweiser bottle that's now filling-up with quarters, and it will be interesting to see how many and what value at cash-in time, its contents yield.

Needless to say, it takes years for those things to fill-up. IMO, the penny is sentimental, but a waste of coinage and space.

[Vince Ferrer]

His years of collecting brought him about $1 a day -- $13,084.59 in all.

It could have brought him much more if he had regularly brought in a change jar to his bank, and earned interest on his deposits.

[David]

The real joke is the US money system.

Pre 1992 pennies contain about 2.2cents worth of valuable copper and other base metals; the successor penny contains over a cent; foreget about the nickle--it is worth over five cents.

How did it get that way? Very simple--the fed debased the US dollar until the metal in the coins had a greater value than their face value as a share of the dollar.

[hschliemann]

Time to divide all prices by 100...

[Lessismore]

Do away with the penny and the nickel. Round everything to the dime.

Judging by the price of a gallon of gas, a dime now has less value that a penny did in 1960.

[Republican Wildcat]

They can probably just hold back printing new pennies every year. There will be plenty in circulation for no more of them are used anymore (given increased numbers of businesses now allowing for credit cards so that change is not used at all) and just print reduced amounts of them when circumstances warrant.

[dpa5923]

Interestingly, in Okinawa, on base, the penny wasn't used. The cost of transporting pennies to Okinawa was/is cost prohibitive, so everything was rounded to the nearest nickel. 9.99 became 10 bucks and 8.72 became 8.70.

[ThinkDifferent]

The Mint's announcement is a milestone, though, because coins have historically cost less to produce than the face value paid by receiving banks. They are moneymakers for the government.

They're only moneymakers for those ignorant of opportunity costs. Even if a penny only costs 0.5 cents to make, and a nickel costs 2 cents, it would still be better to dump the penny and increase nickel production to compensate.

[freedumb2003]

But...but...prices will rise to the nearest nickel and it'll hurt the poor the most!

TAXES will rise by 5% increments instead of 1% increments. THAT is bad.