Guess The New Coin Compositions

Tin is very soft plus it can start falling apart at low temperatures (13° C, in fact, which isn't even that cold). Maybe there are some alloys of tin that would work. Pewter, which is mostly tin, has been used for coins, but I think most pewter objects are cast, not struck. It also may be too soft, and it has quite a low melting point. It's a handsome gray color, so it might do for the nickel in that respect, but I don't know how well it takes plating. I don't know how it fares in terms of cost (the other components like antimony and bismuth are a lot less common than tin).

Manganese is in the War Nickels and brass bucks to make their electrical properties match up well with cupronickel nickels and SBA dollars. By itself it reacts with water, but it might again serve in alloys.

In other words, how about we just quit minting them?

I wonder if there's a cheaper, non-stainless, austenitic steel alloy out there. That is, can you make a steel alloy that is like stainless in its non-magnetic properties, but forgoes the corrosion resistance to make it cheaper.

Thanks to ever-increasing labor costs, no matter how far you cut back material costs, it will get to the point where it costs more than face to makes cents and nickels. Get rid of them.

I think most people here agree that getting rid of them is the best idea. I think if you ask most scientists, they'd agree that we should join the rest of the world in the 19th century and switch over to metric. But as with the metric system, getting rid of our small coins seems to be politically impossible, because voters apparently like them too much.

That's why there's a discussion around minimizing the cost of making cents and nickels, rather than a discussion about getting rid of them. If we're going to lose money while making them, we ought to lose as little as possible.

And the cent has already passed that point. There is no way to bring it's cost down enough to keep from losing money on it short of selling advertising space on it.

Congresspeople care about getting reelected. This will always be the case, because the ones that care about other things instead will not stay in congress. This only partly correlates with what is in the country's best interest (which is not something that can be determined objectively in any case).

Getting reelected partly involves pleasing your constituents, but is mostly about raising money for the campaign. Some efforts are periodically made to reduce the influence of money in politics, but these are opposed by the moneyed interests with all the power, and they're not anxious to give it up.

Because each congressperson represents a specific, narrow slice of the public, the needs of the constituents doesn't generally match up with the needs of the country as a whole. This explains the low approval rating of congress as a whole, but the generally high approval rating of individual congresspeople by their constituents. Everybody hates everyone else's congressperson, but "their guy is alright". What you see as pork, for instance, is somebody else's job. If a senator saves a big factory in their home state, they're locally a hero that gets a highway named after them. Elsewhere they're derided for earmarks or whatever. The results aren't always negative - it's how roads and bridges and schools get built - but the process doesn't make anyone happy.

The problem is exacerbated by gerrymandering. Much of the country is effectively disenfranchised because they live in a district with one-party rule. There are ways to improve that also, but they're not in the interest of people who are already in power, so they don't get implemented (though a few states, such as Iowa, do have anti-gerrymandering statutes that work pretty well.)

As for the coins problem, I don't think any congressman thinks getting rid of cents and nickels is going to help them get reelected. There aren't any obvious ways to raise campaign cash off of it, and there aren't a lot of voters who are going to get excited about the idea. The only potential audience are deficit hawks, and they are generally opposed to any deficit reduction measures that inconvenience them slightly or affect them in any way.

But rather than throwing up our hands and cursing the system and being player haters, we can actually play the game. There are people who would save money, aside from the mint. Specifically, this would benefit small business and banks, which would save time and money by not having to deal with these worthless tokens. As it happens, banks have lots of money and most of congress in their pockets. If we can get banks behind the idea of getting rid of small coins, it'll happen overnight.