Reasons to keep the penny:
1. it’s un-American, changes the fabric of our identity by abolishing a coin we have had forever
2. it’s not going to save the taxpayer a significant amount in terms of our trillion dollar budget
3. it’s step one to moving towards a cashless society
4. it’s something Europoors, Canada, UK, Aus, NZ, have done because they are dogshit poor countries that couldn’t afford more refugees without doing so
5. Stores will game the rounding up system so the average purchase will be rounded up more times than rounded down. up to 90% or more especially with digital price tags that change by the day
6. Fuck you"
As it stands, because of the destruction of sound money, the dollar has lost 99% of its value. What was considered a penny in 1800 would be considered a dollar today (or less). A 1800 dollar worth of gold today costs about 140 dollars.
The copper in a penny used to be worth far less than the value of a penny, but today they can't make a penny out of copper for a penny. They moved to Zinc, but it turns out they can't even make a penny out of Zinc for a penny.
The right answer is to not devalue the currency by 99%, but I'd be ok with eliminating most change to the level of a quarter at this point. I'm not going to bend over to pick up a penny ever, a nickel basically ever, and even a dime most of the time. It's only a quarter where the amount of money is even worth the effort to bend over and pick up.
It's like, the penny represents a smaller and smaller amount of value, it stops making sense to track such a small amount of value. Again, the solution is to stop having so much inflation. If they're not going to do that, it does make sense to eventually abandon coinage that becomes trivially valuable.
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@sj_zero @Littletoad I have read microfiche of newspapers from the late 1800s, I believe it's possible if not probable the free-silver democrats were defeated by election fraud. Silver was the currency of industrial America (see also china and silver). Silver was the coin of global trade. Gold is the coin of tyranny and mass control.
It does feel intuitive, because a coin made of silver is going to be a reasonable size for a reasonable amount of value, but your gold coin is going to be tiny unless it's either debased or for a massive amount of value.
@sj_zero @Littletoad It's not really new, historians of trade have known this, but they leave out the gold and tyranny part. China used its hordes of silver from trade to help finance industrial America. True story.
Gold is more useful for large transactions, silver for smaller ones, but the two metals fluctuate in price relative to each other, so you can't mint a silver coin that represents a static fraction of an oz of gold. Or, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what they did under bimetalizm in the reconstruction era to predictable results vis-á-vis Gresham's law.
@nicholas @sj_zero @Littletoad Unless an Empire-size Empire demands payment in silver, like China.
Something to think about from Graeber:
Why? The single most important factor would appear to be war. Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence. There's a very simple reason for that. Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by on� spectacular feature: they can be stolen. A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust. Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it. In a world where war and the threat of violence are everywhere-and this appears to have been an equally accurate description of Warring States China, Iron Age Greece, and preMauryan India-there are obvious advantages to making one's transactions simple. This is all the more true when dealing with soldiers. On the one hand, soldiers tend to have access to a great deal of loot, much of which consists of gold and silver, and will always seek a way to trade it for the better things in life. On the other, a heavily armed itinerant soldier is the very definition of a poor credit risk. The economists' barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when dealing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.