Great title
The one good executive order to come out of that bag of puss
We should also kill the nickel and paper dollar at this point.
Nickels and dimes sure. Not sure why you’d ditch the dollar yet, it still has buying power. And dropping paper dollars for dollar coins is pants on head levels of stupid
I really hope you’re not advocating for a cashless society.
I’m ready for that possibility
Monero
Great, so throw every homeless or vulnerable person, abuse victims, children, etc who do not have access to a bank account or phone into a completely worse state. Food? Busses? For any of these people they are just now off the table. Eliminate whole sects of the restaurant, service, and gig economy industry overnight and millions will lose their jobs. The amount of people who work under the table at restaurants is outstanding.
Nickel I agree with, but I feel like the the paper dollar is a bit much. Why do you want to get rid of the paper dollar too?
You don’t want an eagleydoo?
I’m all for it. Real talk though: at what point do we consider re-basing the dollar? I get that we’re nowhere near that now, but I’m guessing it’s at the “kill the $1 bill” mark?
I’d answer this with ‘we rebase the dollar when a coin can’t buy a thing.’ It should have happened decades ago. Here’s my worked example.
A penny used to be a lot of money. You could buy actual things with a penny. I’m sure our oldest contributors can point to the day that a penny would get you a piece of candy. In my earliest days, I could get that same piece of candy with a nickel, but by my teens, that piece of candy would be a dime or even quarter. I remember when a bag of M&Ms cost $0.50, That became $1.00 around the 2000s, and is now $2.00.
A penny sitting on the ground was ‘good luck’ back in the day. I think that’s because you could bend down, pick up that penny, head to the store, and plink that penny down and get something in exchange for it. Today, you can’t plink down a single penny for anything. You can’t even plink down 10 of these pennies or a dime and expect to get something today, with the cheapest things requiring 25 of these coins (or a single quarter). Not much luck if you need 25 of them to get a burst of sweetness.
If we did away with the penny, would anyone lose anything? That’s 5 seconds at Federal Minimum Wage, and about 2 seconds at my city’s minimum wage. It takes more time to reach down and pick up the penny than you’d earn working a minimum wage job, so arguments about ‘Oh, prices will go higher if we eliminate the penny’ ring hollow to me. There is functionally no difference between $7.99 and $8.00 pricewise. Even a hike of a $7.9 priced item to $8 isn’t a bunch of money. We’re almost to the point where you can’t buy something with a single dollar bill. The time for the hundredth of that dollar bill passed a LONG time ago.
Inspired by your comment, I decided to look up when the U.S. stopped minting the half penny, as well as what a “half penny” of that time would’ve been worth when accounting for modern inflation.
The U.S. half penny was abandoned in 1857. The inflation calculators I checked don’t allow for division by half-cents, but when $0.01 from 1857 is inflated to today’s value, it comes out to somewhere between 37¢ and 38¢. If I did the math correctly, that means a U.S. half cent was worth a modern equivalent of about 19¢ at the time it was discontinued.
I recall the gumball machine at my childhood barber being a penny in the mid 1980s. I don’t recall when it went up exactly, but it was around then. I was born in 80 so I was pretty young when it happened. But yeah, even then the convenience store in the middle of town had a candy aisle with lots of 5 cent candy that made picking up pennies worthwhile.
I also remember in the later 80s when I began reading them, comics were $0.75 each. Over the next 15 years they went to $3, until I was in college and my comic habit was just too expensive, so I stopped the monthlies completely.
It’s really not a big deal. Canada did this ages ago and the world didn’t explode.
But Canadian money isn’t real money
yeah, we’re all a little loony up here
Proof! Canadian quarter in a vending machine: rejected!
Completely fake money! (/s obv. Border states often interchange Canadian/US currency, vending machines reject currency they don’t know.)
Lots of those Canadian quarters floating around in FL when we lived there.
US slowly working its way to a Japan style monetary system where the fractional unit ceases to be used as the buying power of the main unit dwindles.
Did you know Japan had a coin called ‘sen’ which was 1/100 of a yen? They aren’t made anymore. They’d be near useless if they were because a cup of ramen is ~¥200, or 20000 sen. Although, it would be pretty funny in a show to see some ancient Japanese guy paying for his lunch with his sen collection while some uptight salaryman loses his mind in line behind him.
Anyone would lose their mind in that situation. I had ti leave a store once without buying anything because the guy in front of me was trying to buy his things with coins and I had to go to work.
Good, we should have done this 20 years ago.
Death to nickels!
The problem is you can’t get rid of nickles without getting rid of either quarters or dimes too. Without nickles you would have a denomination (25c) that has no way to be made by lower coins (10c dimes can’t equal 25c). So you either need to get rid of every coin, every coin except the quarter, or nuke the quarter and nickle concurrently and only use dimes, forcing prices to be multiples of 10.
Why do you need to be able to make every denomination from every other one?
That isn’t the specific problem. The problem is that you need a way to make up the difference between them. Example: If someone pays $1.00 for something that costs $0.35, how do you make change without a .05 denomination?
It’s the same issue with the penny, you round up or round down.
If you have no penny, when taxes on your item make the total equal to $5.03, you pay $5.05. if the total is $5.02 you pay $5.00.
Turn the dime into 12.5 cents.
Bring back the bit!
The more I think about it, the more I like it:
- Eliminate the Penny, Nickel, and Dime
- Bring back Old West nomenclature
- IT’S AMERICAN AS FUCK!
- Will drive the metric nerds absolutely batshit. “Of course we have an eighth* of a dollar, why would we use decimal?!”
* I think just the spelling of eighth will spin eurotrash into a tizzy
Sure, but the rounding errors become a lot bigger if you get rid of the nickel.
Suppose you want to buy something that costs a quarter, and what you have is 3 dimes. If there isnt a 5 cent coin, this creates a situation where you have enough money, but making exact change isnt possible, which while not impossible to deal with is bothersome. If we moved to only dimes and no quarters or nickels, it would never make sense to make a price end in 5 cents, so any price would be a multiple of 10 cents and change can always be made. Alternatively, if you get rid of dimes and nickels but keep quarters, then it doesnt make sense to charge a price ending in something other than .00, .25, .50, or .75, and so you can always make change for those prices with the coins one would have.
Literally none of this matters anyways if pennies are going, because making prices end in certain amounts won’t work as nice in practice as it does here for the simple reason that US prices almost never include taxes.
I mean, presumably fractions of a dollar still exist as a concept even if the coins don’t, so if you’re selling something that someone might buy in cash, one could just set the sticker price so that the final price plus tax ends up as a round number, essentially including tax when deciding on price and then taking it out again when making the labels, if one wanted to do that.
Replace the quarter with a 20¢ piece. Then you can keep getting rid of the lowest coin.
Just use dimes and half dollars
Unfortunately half dollars are comically large
They don’t have to be. The old silver dollar coin was huge, but the sacagawea dollar coin is no bigger than a quarter
Why’s it a bad idea to get rid of coins at this point anyway. What can you still buy that is a fraction of a dollar that actually matters? Anything that cheap can just be sold in multiples that amount to even dollar amounts.
Getting rid of coins and rounding to nearest dollar sounds great to me but I don’t know what the drawbacks are.
There’s still some edge cases floating around. Some laundromats, parking meters, using a shopping cart at Aldi, older vending machines, bottle deposits, probably a few more but that’s off the top of my head.
“Getting rid of coins and rounding to nearest dollar sounds great to me but I don’t know what the drawbacks are.”
I just want to thank you for having the best analysis that I will see today. You are correct that this would be bad and it is nice to see that you understand that you might not see this.
We would be screwing the poorest very hard by making everything round up. Should we have the person literally counting pennies suffer because you want fewer coins in your pocket or because the “it costs more to make than it’s worth” people are too daft to get that we use pennies many times over?
Removed by mod
Agreed, why just the penny, eliminate the whole decimal place.
I’ve got a great business idea: I’ll collect a few million dollars worth of nickels and sell them back to the government for 10 cents each. That’s about a 28% discount to the manufacturing cost, and I’ll double my money. Win-win!
Chad Kroeger and his fans have been through enough. LEAVE HIM ALONE! LEAVE CHAD ALONE!
Chad walks into a committee meeting to explain why we should end the production of our copper familiar. “LOOK AT THIS PENNY GRAPH, every time I do it makes me laugh”
I assume you’re alluding to this - https://youtu.be/58SrtQNt4YE
He’s not a good source for economic analysis. He has no background in the subject. This would have a fallout that would harm the most vulnerable.
Indeed.
So is this one of those things where Americans do the common sense thing and agree?
Or is this the another classic case of a few very loud and emotional Americans screaming with passion and zero logic?
Or is it one of those situations where everything seems to go smoothly. And then you figure out that they didn’t add the correct rounding regulations, so you’ll be paying a little extra on every single transaction the store puts at .96?
It’s going to be 2 and 3.
First 3. Then 2 because yokels will complain that “them walmarts is stealin my money!”
I do have a funny story about someone determined to get his .01 cent.
USAF. We were leaving after a month long TDY (not a deployment, but you do go to a different place, stands for Temporary Duty Assignment) to England. The crew and us maintenance guys all stayed at the same hotel off base. We spent this month meeting with them in the morning in front of the fire place, and usually finding out the mission got canceled for the day. We were all ready to go home.
The head maintenance guy was a penny pincher. He had like 8 kids, so he kind of had to. This is a guy that went around base picking fruit off the trees. He left Saudi with a large bag of free MREs. We all joked that that was the only way he could eat at home because no one else wanted to eat them.
Anyway, we’re leaving finally. We’re all on the bus. Air crew and maintenance. Maintenance usually has to show up about 45 mins prior so we can inspect and get everything ready. So this was going to be a quick turn and out. We stopped by the base gas station to pick up snacks for the flight home. Everyone but the head maintenance guy is back on the bus. 5 mins. 10 mins. 15 mins. The pilot finally had enough. “WTF is taking him so long?”
He goes in and comes back out almost right away with the guy in tow. Why was he in there so long? He was arguing with the cashier over his change…1 penny. The pilot went in, found out what the hold up was, and told him, “I’ll give you the damned penny. lets go!” while dragging his ass out.
Here in Canada we got rid of the penny years ago.
When paying in cash, we round to the nearest 0.05 but with card payments it’s still the exact price.
Also, the amount of money you’d lose by rounding in a cash transaction is pretty minimal.
Common cents
Kill the nickel and dime while we’re at it.
Why would you want to get economic analysis from a non-expert/complete amateur?
I promise you there would be significant fallout to this that Grey, who has no economics degrees nor any experience at all in economics, is not going to catch because Grey is only good at the very basic stuff that amatuers like myself can explain competently.
What fallout? Their worth is negative. Other countries and the us have done this when the impact was theoretically higher.
I’ll admit I’m not an economist but this easily passes the smell test without further explanation of the negative.
How is theor worth negative? Are they one time use items?
The (negative) value is created at minting. They are negative value and then just part of the system in circulation. Many aren’t in circulation either, though. They sit in a jar until they go to the bank and then shoved in a vault at the federal reserve.
Since they get used multiple times they do not retain that negative value.
Canada got rid of the penny 12 years ago. Hardly raised an eyebrow.
Probably cause Canadians aren’t weird about their currency.
All Canadian bills keep getting redesigned.
one time they made the 10$ bill vertical and no one gave a shit
And they put a black woman on it. Ooooooo scary!
I love the vertical $10 bill.
We Americans do occasionally get the dollar coin redesigned. Sometimes our leaders are forward thinking and recognize important historical figures. I have a few with Sacajawea on it.
I want the next one to be rotated, but still in portrait. Giant black bars on the sides, and the print is tiny. Like full screening a badly edited video.
half of them are still circulating in the U.S.
I love your polymer notes. Makes our greenbacks look like antiques.
frankly they might aswell cut the 5 cent piece too while theyre at it.
Make a 20¢ piece instead of the quarter and everything can go to the nearest 10¢. Then eventually we can get rid of the dime too and everything can go to the nearest 20¢.
Please do not put the idea in Trump’s head that he can mint new denominations. They will all have his face.
This is the forward thinking we need right now.
This is what the euro currency did, I expect for this reason.
No, forward thinking is to depreciate the dime, ahead of its time. When the penny was introduced it was worth the equivalent of 37 cents today. Round only to quarters. No new coins - a new 20 cent piece wouldn’t be compatible with coin infrastructure today.
If we actually optimized the cost of production beforehand this could work
Just scrap anything less than $1. Then make coins $1 $5 $10 $20 that look and feel similar to the penny, nickel, dime, & quarter but are really replacing these paper bills.
Why would you want coins instead of paper bills?
They last a lot longer. This is why Canada switched to coins for $1 and $2
Homie just wants to have his pants constantly jingling.
They last longer. Up to this point the government could not get the public to adopt the $1 coin, largely because it was too big physically, and cashiers didn’t have an extra slot in their coin drawer. We could change all that now, if we convert $1, $5, $10, and $20 into coins the appear similar to the penny, nickel, dime, and quarter.
We want the fantasy-trope coin-pouch hanging from our belts! We’ll tors down bags of coins! It’ll be great!
It’s going to be harder to ask people what they’re thinking 🤔
Got a nickel for your thoughts?
Just have a $1 coin that can snap into 10 pieces like a chocolate bar. And a $100 note that tears into 10 pieces like a book if stamps.
Cool. Do the dollar bill next. Go buck and doublebuck coin like Canadia did.
If I can’t buy a gallon of milk or gasoline with it, it should be a coin.
