Posted on 11/16/2007 9:04:06 PM PST by neverdem
Eliminate the penny, and you can bet that every purchase that used to end with a .X3 will be rounded up to a .X5. Which means that the average penny will pay for itself the first time a taxpayer uses it. Every other useage over its lifetime circulation will be gravy.
I read once that for every tax dollar taken by our income redistibuting welfare system, only 17 cents actually lands in the hands of a recipient. In essence, welfare is 500% inefficient. Reducing it to 100% would save countless billions and balance the budget in a couple years.
Prior to 1982 a penny weighed 3.1 grams, or about 146 to the pound.
Todays copper quote is about $3.15 per pound.
Net gain on just the value of the metal is $1.69 per pound, each cent is worth .0216 cents.
“This little brown item of pocket clutter”
“I suppose, as a fiscal conservative, a concerned citizen, and—at least until the cocktail hour—a decent human being, I should have been indignant.”
Sigh! Always loved P.J.’s writing.
I remember hearing about welfare too, but I thought it was 28 cents efficient per dollar spent. Ain’t government great?
To quote Will Rogers, "Thank goodness we don't get all the government we pay for".
I lived without pennies for many years when I was stationed in Japan. The military stopped using them in the commissary and exchange systems because of the cost involved in shipping the pennies across the ocean. All prices stayed the same. The totals were rounded up or down to the nearest nickel. Did we come out ahead or behind? I don’t know. I do know I sure as hell didn’t miss pennies and I was annoyed when I came back to the States and had to deal with them again.
bump for later
I would rather that new currency were issued — the same denominations as today, but worth ten times as much. That would make the cent worth what it was 60 years ago. (This won’t happen any time soon.)
Imagine if the smallest denomination coin was a dime — that’s what a cent was worth 60 years ago. People seemed to get along just fine without a smaller unit of value.
“How much do you suppose it costs the U.S. Mint to produce a penny?
Let me tell you—with a deeply self-satisfied howl of execration—
almost 2 cents.”
IIRC, it took the Mint something like $44 MILLION to design,
stamp and launch the Sacajawea dollar coin.
And I saw a news report in which the Sacajawea dollars were being
handed out FREE to (dare I say it) waiting riders at one public
transportation hub in some major “inner city”.
And all the time I was in Los Angeles, would the vending machines
at UCLA or around Santa Monica take them?
NO!!!
The only place I found that actually used a Sacajawea dollar coin
was the ticket machines at the main station in downtown LA.
And even then one time the machine ate the Sacajaweas I fed it.
(The tickets machines are the “armless” bandits run by the city
of Los Angeles!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea_dollar
Reverse split the dollar. $1 becomes 10¢ buys the same thing. Copper becomes 32¢ a lb.
Just kidding!
Yeah, it is not generally looked upon as a good idea to devalue your currency.
Since any system that uses digits needs a minimum unit containing a terminal 1, in order to remain accurate, the penny serves a vital purpose. It allows fine adjustment of value that counting by 5s doesn’t.
Consider this. Every sale of gas that is pumped in the US shorts the customer 1 to 5/10th of a penny, half the time and gives 1 to 4/10th back half the time. Every 10 sales, they make an extra cent. Now multiply that by the number of gas sales per year. Now imagine if you rounded every purchase price in America to the nearest nickle, biasing up. Or every sales tax percent that rounds up. It may not seem much, but across the whole population and economy, those mils and two cents add up.
One of the most effective embezzlement schemes I ever heard of was a guy who programmed computer accounting software for a bank. He set it up so that any time a transaction or interest payment was rounded unevenly, it put the spare 1/2 cent in a dummy account at the end of the list. He was only caught when some guy named something like Zzyxz opened an account and reported its unexplained growth.
It was time to abolish the penny long ago. They’re clutter. They can’t buy anything. I have enough of them that I think they’re a threat to the structural integrity of my house.
Will prices be rounded? Sure. They are now. Unless your produce weighs precisely one pound or your gas is precisely one gallon, the price is being rounded to the nearest cent. Actually, scratch the latter case — gasoline is already priced at, say, $3.109 a gallon. That weaselly little nine-tenths of a cent is at every gas station I’ve seen in the last 20 years. Oh, and when you add sales tax, that 5, 6, 7 10 or whatever % rarely adds up to an exact number of cents. You’re being rounded, dude.
And while we’re at it, why not get rid of the $1 bill? Dollar coins last longer and cost less to keep in circulation. But we Americans form irrational attachments to our coins and currency.
So can I take my old pennies off to be recycled someplace for more than one cent each?
obviously, the government needs to start printing paper pennies.
That was a plot device in at least two movies: The excellent Office Space and the execrable Superman III. I don't know if those screenwriters were inspired by a real scheme, or they were just that creative.
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