Trump announces plan to stop making new pennies, citing production costs
Trump announces plan to stop making new pennies, citing production costs
President Donald Trump announced he is directing the treasury secretary to stop the production of pennies as a cost-cutting measure.
Not gonna lie, I agree with this. Pennies are useless.
You know what they say, “even a broken penny is right twice a dollar”
Or something like that
Thanks to Trump, America doesn't make any cents.
Slow clap...
The reason we continued to make the penny is to maintain zinc production, which is important for wartime manufacturing.
By ending penny production, it will save money, but may compromise our future ability to wage war.
So two wins
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.usmint.gov/learn/history/historic-coin-production
For the year 1943, pennies became zinc-coated steel because copper was essential to the war effort during World War II.
This is the closest I could find and I really doubt that this means much in the 21st century.
I mean for fucks sake we were using depleted uranium rounds during the Iraq War, not copper.
What about galvanized steel though? You know, like traffic signs, light posts, some cars, various construction materials etc? You could use zinc in so many ways. I expect those applications would also take a lot more zinc than the pennies ever could.
So as soon as the zinc lobbyist pay him, he'll back out.
What portion of our zinc production goes to manufacturing pennies?
someone tell him he's just copying canada now
Nothing wrong with taking a good idea and following it yourself.
But from the person who likes to think he’s always leading and not just a little bitch, anybody pointing it out probably gets ousted.
Should also drop nickels, quarters, and one dollar bills.
We'll have dimes (should be made larger), half dollar, and one dollar coins.
All prices can then be rounded to $0.1 instead of $0.01.When we got rid of hay pennies (worth half a penny) in 1857, they were worth more than $0.15 is today.
Only reason I'd keep the dime around, is because we aren't quite ready to round prices to a whole dollar.The quarter is the biggest problem with this plan. There's just too much stuff that runs on quarters and quarters themselves as a currency denomination have too much cultural staying power.
Unfortunately, there being a 25¢ coin rather than the more globally-common 0.20 piece means that it isn't practical to retire the nickel because it will still be possible to get non-multiples of 10¢.
$1 notes are important, not because of any reason in the US (dollar coins would work equally well in almost any application), but because the US dollar circulates widely in foreign countries that are suffering hyperinflation of their local currencies and have thus informally dollarised. There, US coinage is basically non-existent meaning the lowest denomination that can be transacted in USD cash is $1. See the situation in Zimbabwe where American banknotes circulate until they literally fall apart or the ink has all faded away off.
So the existence of a $1 note is paramount to keeping the economies of these countries going. It would be impossible to conduct business if the smallest denomination is $5 and your $4 an hour salary is paid in cash.
Remember, as unfortunate as it is, much of the US's monetary policy is driven by the fact that the US dollar isn't just America's currency. It's the entire world's currency.
Every pay phone in America cost a dime when I was little. Then, by the time I was old enough to need to carry around change for a pay phone, all of them only took quarters. Do you know how many millions of pay phones there used to be? They somehow found it cost-efficient to modify almost every single one of them in the entire country. After the Bell system was broken up.
There’s just too much stuff that runs on quarters [...] too much cultural staying power.
"Because that's the way it is" is never a good reason not to do something new.
It's always the case that things don't change. Until they suddenly and unexpectedly do. Then in hind sight it seems obvious they should have changed long earlier.US dollar circulates widely in foreign countries [...] There, US coinage is basically non-existent
There's no real reason coins couldn't circulate in foreign markets. They don't because the value to weight ratio is worse for shipping. But if the coin value went up to a dollar, and the dollar note wasn't an option anymore, foreign markets would adapt just fine. Especially since the coins would circulate for decades longer.
Pennies should go away, but this isn’t the way to do it. Canada’s process was well thought out with lots of guidance and direction.
This is dumb and will cause lots of confusion.
Holy fucking shit, a broken clock moment?
To be fair, honestly, I'd like to think that Fascists at least know that $0.03 > $0.01 is a bad trade.
DOGE is shooting for optics, not actual savings. Cutting penny production is about $90M out of the $6.1T deficit. Which isn't as useful to the American people as the headline is for DOGE. Their goal is to get one of these headlines every month to make it look like they're doing something useful.
But 70% of our deficit is: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military, and Interest payments on debt.
- They can't cut interest payments, period.
- They won't cut military, obviously, but there is probably a lot of low hanging fruit here that they should be scrutinizing.
- They might cut SS or Medi*, predictably eating the faces of their base.
And if they cut literally everything except for these, we'd still run over a $4T deficit. Meanwhile, the quality of life for Americans by cutting all that will get measurably worse.
So yeah, more likely is that they'll keep aiming for random little optics opportunities, while trying to find ways to funnel more of this money to Musk and his buddies via govt contracts.
What part of the deficit is Social Security? It’s self-funded, no?
The boomer generation is getting old. There are more people drawing from SS than paying into it.
- As a result, social security has been running a deficit since 2010
- In 2023 social security made up 1.3T, or ~20% of our deficit.
- According to a report last year, at this rate the social security fund will deplete in 2035
Or assume they're only pretending to save money and it's all about crippling our government.....
Yes, that's exactly the point I made.
I've been throwing pennies away for years. Now I got to throw away nickels? Trump ruins another thing I liked.
I'll take your pennies!
Trump thinks pennies are useless because he wasn't allowed to use them in a strip club.
This will require rounding up to the nearest nickel... Which costs $0.14 to make 🙄
I disagree in the sense most transactions are digital now and pennies are worth a penny every time they are used. If there are indication folks are trying to recover the base value of pennies then it makes sense. It will have to be done eventually though and better trump be the president that killed lincolns coin.
why does it take an executive order from someone like Donald Trump to do this? I could be wrong but I don't think there's any developed country that has a smaller denomination note. in my shithole country they simply round up to the nearest $1000
Idk if it'll save any money, costs pennies to manufacture
Cool, I think this is a good idea.
Australia did this in the... 90s? I wanna say 90s. We had 1c and 2c coins, but they decided it was costing too much to produce them. So they phased them out gradually I think.
I bring forth, "the pee pee!"
A durable replacement for the penny...a Plastic Penny! "Pee, pee!" Get it?