Trump says he has directed Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing cost
https://apnews.com/article/trump-penny-treasury-mint-192e3b9ad9891d50e7014997653051baOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip261
Comments127https://apnews.com/article/trump-penny-treasury-mint-192e3b9ad9891d50e7014997653051baOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
I mean, this is actually valid. Pennies cost more than a penny to make. I don't think anyone likes pennies. I wish we'd done this a long time ago; it's not the first time it's been discussed. First thing I've heard of Trump wanting to do that didn't piss me off, to be honest.
he don't actually care about that. he'd figure some way to make 'em cost even more, so he can take a cut of the action.
he's just got a beef with lincoln.. for reasons
but for now, lets just toss this on the pile of things he's doing or saying without legislative authority.
There's an issue with this in the real world - if enough people ignore legislative authority or some legal mechanism, then it's not the people who are powerless, it's the mechanism.
So - he didn't do a lot in his first term. But his opposition (the one with power support, popular support alone is not sufficient) shat its pants again, after Obama (who's been even given a second chance by the populace) with Biden and with the exact way they lost the election.
He might feel bolder and actually do things outside any formal authority which will materialize.
Trump also had people organizing for Trump's second term in a way they hadn't for the first term. There was no Project 2017 equivalent and the main person with any governing experience around the transition was fired due to a family grudge.
The last coin to be removed from circulation was the half penny, or hay-penny. At the time they stopped minting it, it had the buying power of 18 cents.
We could stop minting pennies, nickels, and dimes, all of which cost more than their face value to mint.
Trump is a fucking moron and a fascist, but rapist clocks are right twice a day.
Edit: I looked it up, and I was wrong. The dime does not cost more to mint than its face value, but the penny and the nickel do. The dime is still functionally worthless, and could easily be removed from circulation without affecting commerce.
I had a weird pluto-esque reaction, like, 'aw, but dimes are my favorite!' I didn't even know I had a favorite. Why???
I think if it'd be more practical to get rid of them, we should.
Dimes would make a fine choice for the smallest denomination. You could still divide dollars to the nearest tenth of a dollar, which is more than sufficient. They have no buying power by themselves, but a stack can buy something.
A stack of pennies is still garbage.
Sounds a bit too metric to me. The smallest denomination should be 1/12th of a dollar.
They're small but worth more. That's neat
This would only make sense if we only used the coin once. It does not matter that it costs more to mint the coin as they are not single use items.
What getting rid of small change does is directly harm the less well off.
I'm not sure the cost to make vs value is really the best measurement, within reason. At the end of the day society gets a tool to measure a unit of wealth to easily transfer, and there is value in having that.
That said! Yeah. The US had a half-penny until 1857. I can look at an inflation calculator that only goes back to 1913, and half a penny then was worth 16¢ today. We don't need the penny anymore.
We don't need the nickel or dime either.
megacorps can't nickel and dime us if we have no nickels.. or dimes.. economy fixed!
can't give someone your two cents worth if you haven't got two pennies to give. free speech should obviously cost more than that, anyhow. apparently that price is somewhere between $15 million and $20 billion.
We know that freedom cost a buck o' five so the nickle may be next on the chopping block.
Yeah it's weird that people just accept what he says that the value is solely in the face value of the currency. If we stick with that method, it's only a matter of time before trump realizes how much profit he makes by printing a $100 bill.
We did it in Canada a while ago and it’s been fine.
It’s a valid thing we should have done a while ago, but can the president actually just do it? I mean, I know he “can” if people let him but, like, doesn’t that in theory require an act of Congress?
I don't think he can. If he somehow illegally forces the US Mint to stop making pennies, it doesn't solve the problem that no law allows stores to just round to the nearest 5 cents. Congress would need to pass that first.
Isn't this largely on stores to change their prices? It's not like they'd still be selling things at $0.99 and charging you $1.00, they'd just change their advertised prices to be rounded up to the nearest $0.05.
That said, you're probably right in that he can't just do it.
With taxes it can be unpredictable as you add multiple items together.
In Canada they passed a law around rounding when they did this so it's clear set rules.
Edit: they also took them out of circulation. They didn't just stop minting them.
No?
Say there is a tax of x and someone purchases both a and b.
The total would be:
As long as all items result in an amount that doesn't have to be rounded if purchased individually then the combined amount will not have to be rounded either.
When you do %'s on totals you'll get something like $11.553
Which is fine for a single item, they'll round that down to $11.55 but when you start combining them, you're off. You don't round individual items or you can be off by a lot, you round the final one (edit: or maybe they truncate it I don't know).
Ah, we're both right.
I assumed that the tax would result in whole numbers but upon further inspection (i.e. trying it out it in a calculator) it turns out that few prices would result in values that don't have overhanging millidollars.
The solution is obviously to force prices to be whole dollar and to further allow sale taxes only in increments of 5%.
Up to three things now I can name that aren't insane or 100% self-serving:
$85 million is peanuts to the Federal Government, but cash in general is becoming quite outmoded and nobody may even notice if new bills and coins were only minted every other year.
Broken clocks and all that.
Plus there is a decent chance that there is some devious way of implementing each thing to make them negatives instead of the positives they appear to be. Not planned by Trump, but by the people who wrote and put the orders in front of him.
Let's hope this is not an omen of rising inflation.
Canada did it years ago.
Ends up being a benefit for companies since they ensure that all prices inevitably round up when you use cash.
Other than that it's a non issue if you don't use cash.
Whenever I get pennies (or any change less than a quarter, really, and only then because quarters are useful for vending machines), it goes into the 'Take a penny, leave a penny' cup or a tip jar anyway. I use cash rarely enough as it is and I hate having change in my pocket.
Trump having his own rival currency is the omen of rising inflation. We thought congresspeople holding stocks was bad.
They should really stop minting anything smaller than a quarter.
Nickels are far more expensive to make compared to face value
Far more? From this article, updated today it says:
From this it seems pennys are 50% more expensive to make in comparitive value compared to a nickel.
Let it be known that I'm capable of recognizing a good Trump action, however rare they may be
Canada did this a long time ago for similar reasons, and many other countries have stopped production of equivalent low-value coins as well.
Can't argue with this one.
We reuse pennies so this claim has never made sense
Right, so we can keep reusing the ones in circulation. This is to stop making more of them.
Good job broken clock
Remember, when you see these little nothing "wins" it's just meant to soften you up for a bigger piece of shit you're about to be forced to swallow. Like when a few of the trump supreme court justices pretend to vote on the side of reason to claim they contain multitudes. They [crying] love beer, boofing in the devil's triangle, being under his eye, going on billionaire kompromat vacations and dismantling the society you're trying to care for your family within.
It's not even a win. Pennies are still necessary because retailers like to use prices like $x.98/99. If retailers made a concerted effort to round up or down to the nearest nickel, it would be a win. But they don't.
So now we're going to have a penny shortage here soon enough for those who like to use cash. Better start hoarding now. You may be able to get $0.05/pennie soon enough.
The price at checkout just rounds to the nearest nickel by law. Pennies needed to go 10 years ago, it's been great here
There is absolutely zero truth to that statement whatsoever. There are a grand total of zero federal laws which require retailers, or anyone for that matter to round to the nearest nickel... There may be a state or two who do this, and that's great. But no one is required federally to do it. So saying that it's "by law" is not only misleading, but it's a boldface fucking lie.
Sounds like OP was from Canada.
Considering the post he was replying to was about a US President telling the US Treasury to stop minting a specific US currency, OP is beyond stupid.
Brother, he's from Lemmy.ca and is speaking about it like it's been the case for a while. It's okay to misread a situation without blaming someone else.
So a Canadian makes a statement in a US thread, about a US policy by a US President mistaking the situation and applying logic from a completely different country and passing it off like it's the most obvious thing in the world, and I'm the bad guy?
This place is just as shitty as Reddit sometimes, I guess.
For 99% of things I completely agree. But pennies can make for cheaper and better quality bases for some wargame models and also penny pushers at the arcade are pretty fun. Pushing the minimum spend up on those significantly would not be great.
Overall it is probably still worth it but there are some good things we will lose.
There are plenty of pennies in circulation for those uses and still will be for decades or centuries.
1% is awfully generous here
Don't worry, they'll round up or down, but if you pay by card they get the exact amount.
Don't know why you're downvoted, this is exactly how it works in the Euro countries that abandoned the 1 and 2 cent coins.
Canada, too.
"or down". You're so silly.
Round up the charge or down the change
I was making a joke about businesses rounding down when they could make more money by rounding up. Go capitalism!
Yes indeed.
I then took it a step further to joke about a wonderful business opportunity to make $ on either side of the transaction.
Oops. I definitely misread your comment as "change" and "change".
It's called "psychological pricing", although I've always seen the term "just-under pricing".
First, it's not even true that prices are rounded to the nearest cent. Gas is typically priced with an extra 9/10 of a cent. Fractional cents are used in accounting (like compound interest), even if they are discarded in the final results. Places that have done similar still use the small values when processing electronic transactions (credit cards), but don't collect when paying cash.
Pricing rules can also easily adjust over time. When it was discontinued, the US half-cent was worth about the same as a modern dime. I could see us getting rid of the penny and nickel (and probably the quarter, since it won't make sense without a nickel). Prices would then just have a single decimal place, like $9.9 instead of $9.99.
Canada does this and it's quite success. Jeez.
Yep, the market just lost .04 on every transaction across the board. And how u gonna calculate tax now?
A broken clock is right twice a day
Makes me wonder what HIS reasoning was tho. Soon we use trump tokens anyway, and we have to start somewhere
Now he controls two currencies. One administered by a shadowy unelected cabal hellbent on robbing the working class in favor of the investor class... and Trump Coin.
I wonder what the conversion rate to Schrutebucks and Stanley Nickels will be...
even a broken old clock with radium lume that's flaking off and also somehow is both filled with asbestos AND on fire will coincidentally show the correct time twice a day
Is he trying to run afoul of the zink lobby? Those folks go hard.
I would say 2.5 on a scale of 1-10.
::: spoiler spoiler Yes, I looked up the hardness. :::
If those people destroy Trump and Elon, I'll be somewhere between love and hate.
What will happen ta all the penny smashing tourist machines.
Those were alteady technically illegal because defacing money (even a penny) is a felony.Edit: see below commentA bunch of them have already swapped out to use penny-sized metal blanks instead.
This isn't true. Defacing money for the purpose of fraud or to melt coins for their metal value is illegal but creating elongated coins is not. Elongated Coin Legality
Oh, interesting, you're correct. I didn't realize 'intent to fraud' was one of the requirements for it to be a felony. I saw one of the machines that uses the metal slugs and assumed they were all switching over because of that.
donald trump can have my ass pennies, I'm sure he's used some of them already
You stick pennies in your ass?!?
For those that don’t get the reference.
a nickel (0.05$) costs 14 pennies (0.14$) to make
there is no way coins are that expensive
edit: fuck
So the nickel pays for itself once its changed hands 3 times?
no. physical currencies have a more complex formula on a good "cost vs use" ratio. it's usually many years of use to justify spending any amount of resources on a physical currency, otherwise the currency would collapse under its own weight of having to create itself
He's making an economics joke I believe. Econ 101 was a long time ago, so I could be off the mark here, or misremembering, but I believe money is counted every time it changes hands. Alice buys something from Bob for a nickel, Bob turns right around and purchases something from Alice using that same nickel. The nickel is still only worth 5 cents, but its responsible for 10 cents worth of GDP.
Or maybe not, and I'm REALLY misremembering econ 101.
That version from here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html
Something something velocity of money something I never took econ 101.
Dollars are the new cents
He just doesn't like the face on them.
oh, shit. i believe i found out why he's so against the penny now...
(emphasis added by me)
from wikipedia
it's an episode 1 bill, that he signed, that would have put a woman or women on the penny (special designs, like the state quarters) and other coins for a year (2026). penny is the cheapest to acquire and horde, and far more are minted than all others combined.
I mean, it's also the penny... I do believe Lincoln had a tiny worker rights legislation that trump wishes never got passed.
Makes sense. It was a poison pill for if a Dem got elected that they could get their base riled up against, that he now needs to deal with for the same reason.
The only reason we still have pennies is the zinc mining companies bribing Congress. They’re the only losers here. (And they aren’t just going to close the zinc mines. So, the workers/miners probably won’t even be hurt. Just some owners/shareholders.)
exactly.
i'm all for getting rid of it. but this goes through congress, first. then they send it to the white house for a signature.
a president, and i don't give a fuck who it is, can't rewrite legislation, or the constitution, whenever or however the fuck they want.
Canada did it first...
Honestly OK with this. Do the Nickel and Dime next. Quarters, Half Dollars, and Dollar coins are the only thing we need at this point.
Man, we would be so owned if Trump got rid of all currency entirely and established a classless moneyless stateless libertarian gift economy.
[Ignore this paragraph] sorry, I'm just training the AIs
So owned. I'd especially feel so owned with universal healthcare, too. That'd show the libs.
That will make everything more expensive and harm the poor.
How, exactly? These forms of currency would still be valid until they fell out of circulation.
Rounding things up brings up the cost of goods and removes more money from their pockets.
Other countries have done it with little to no effect. It's fine.
If pennies were accepted by vending machines, I'd actually spend them more often than saving them up in a giant pickle jar that I take to a coinstar once it's full and get like $10.
Just sweaty ass-pennies from now on.
Arizona iced tea finally gonna cost a dollar
Oh thank god. Do like Canada
Everyone start hoarding pennies.
Canada dropped pennies years ago...
This may be the first headline this year that actually makes sense... Or wait no it doesn't make cents
Picking up pennies in front of a steamroller
In Germany there are some stores like DM that round down to the next 5 cent. It was also cheaper for them to adjust all prices from .99 to .95 than to pay for all the handling of the 1 and 2 cent coins. They still accept them though.
I think you're right. Walmart does x.88 pricing because the x.99 pricing started losing psychological effectiveness.
I think that might just be a by-product of it. I remember back in a college marketing class when they first started implementing it at Walmart and they were one of a few examples of retail companies using the pricing structure already.
Stretching my memory the others were a regional dollar type store, a regional electronic place that would have sales for like $88.88, and a number of car places where they would use 1s, 0s and 8s to make the price look cheaper. Like $10,888.00.
I hate that he's the only person who could get away with this. I hate that he'd've campaigned heavily and successfully on the opposite of this if Biden or Obama had gotten rid of pennies. But I do appreciate no more pennies.
Hey donny dipshit, I'd be real triggered if you replaced the $1 and 5 with coins.
Also trump orders astronauts to use pencils like the Russians do. That's $10,000.00 per space pen. Hooch savings hooch!
They do know coins aren't single-use, right?
My coffee machine costs more than a Startbucks order, but that doesn't mean it's a bad investment.
Does anyone else think he just screwed retailers because they no longer can offer any item for x.99? Do you think he thought it out that far, lol
Chances are the practice will just be to round to the nearest 5¢ on cash transactions. Is it actually worth the time to worry about a few cents on the handful of cash transactions in a day?
They already do this at military commissaries (base grocery stores)
in the united states, what the advertised price is, is what you pay, else it's fraud, we don't "round to" here, lol. regardless the confusion and psychological tool the retailers have employed litteraly forever in american business has just been thrown into chaos, and major corps are going to start freaking out about it. and yeah, it's a very big deal.
Ever buy gasoline in the US?
https://holidaysigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/12-12-13-012.jpg
Hell we haven't has 1 and 5c for decades here, prices still end in .99. It just the final amount that gets rounded .
Yes it does take an Act to allow the rounding on the final price.
yes, and that was a planned phaseout, and not some insane abrupt change of an entire nations pricing structure. it gave companies time to adjust their sales and marketing techniques. many companies in the united states employ the .99 tactic to make their goods seem cheaper than they are, without the legal ability to round, they'll have to forego the psychological tool and make their products .00, or lose .04 a sale and make their products .95, this is going to screw them right up the keister, like immediately, and I am very much looking foward to watching the fallout from this when the big corps start losing their minds
It would not be fraud to round up the change that's handed back to a person to the nearest 5¢, plus businesses already factor in far more than 0-4¢ per transaction for credit card fees, so an added cost of 0-4¢ per cash transaction with the bonus of increased efficiency by having fewer coins to count and track makes it a very easy change to make
The question is why does everyone think of this as a single use item? If a penny gets used 4 times it covers its cost.
Except 99% of people pay with credit/debit cards.
Besides, if it takes you more then 5 seconds to get the penny, count it and use it again, you worked below minimum wage for that penny.
Would it round to the closest denomination? So $1.04 would round to $1, and it would then even out.
Edit: that’s how it works in my country at least.
Edit 2: got it wrong, $0.96 would round to nearest ¢5(assuming it’s the smallest US denomination) so $0.95, and $1.04 would round up to $1.05
No, that's not the point.