Steel Coin Bill Gets Hearing In House.

the value of a nickel is more than its cost to produce. How many hundreds or thousands of transactions does a nickel participate in during its lifetime. I think getting rid of the cent is a no brainer, however.

i agree they should just stop making them if they cost too much. I was reading a post on here that in the next 5 years money will be all electronic and smart phones will be the way we purchase stuff nobody really even uses checks anymore either

I suspect you are correct.

One of the "round it down" mom and pop's that I frequent told me they started rounding down when they noticed they were running out of cents every day. They would give them out, but no one would ever pay with them.

Right now all I'm hearing is theory. Contrary to what has been said here there are still a lot of people who use cash in the day to day purchasing and the idea that merchants are going to routinely round down their sales (to say nothing about the states volunteering to forgo some of their revenue) is not true.

As one of the other posters here have said retail merchants will increase their sale prices. States are also not willingly going to give back or round down their revenue, if anything they will issue new sales tax charts that will incorporate the round up feature.

The government will not willingly give up a portion of their revenue. If that was true the sales taxes on our phone bills that go back to WWII would have been gone long ago, and yet we still have them. The same on other taxes that have to be re-entitled from time to time. With the cities and states looking for more revenue to cover their short falls why would someone think that they to will round down to down. The proposition is truly laughable on the fact of it.

Retail merchants of all levels are in business to make money. When and if they lose money they will raise their prices to cover their losses. So I don't think that they will continue to round down to be nice guys and help us out. Why should they after all if they increase their prices by a couple of cents overall who's going to really know?

I do not think you understand how it works. At the end of the month they still have to report total sales and pay their taxes. The government is not going to give up anything. Even if they did, the loss would be a fraction of what they already lose to other nefarious cash only transactions.

No they don't, not anymore! They did up through last year, but only because they were striking dollar coins. If they had stopped making dollar coin in 2011 instead of 2012 the mint would have reported a $34 million dollar loss for last year. The vast majority of the reported profits for last year was the seigniorage from the dollar coin. Well this year there are no dollar coins, and cent and nickel production is probably up which means a bigger loss this year.

Last year they lost $60.2 million on the cents, $56.5 million on the nickels, and $23.3 million on "mutilated and other" On the profit side they made $61 million on the dimes and $45 million on the quarters. That's $140 million in losses and $106 million in profits. the only thing that kept them out of the red was $382.8 million in profits from the dollar coins. And we don't have those this year.

I don't know how it works in your state. But where I live the state issues a tax schedule, and if a vendor does not follow it, the vendor is held liable and the state will make the business follow their schedule. It is not as simple as a business applying the sales tax rate to their sales. If during an audit the state determines that a vendor has not remitted the full tax collected (less their discount) then the vendor can be prosecuted for tax cheating.




Poppycock, that may be well an good where you live, but I can assure you that it is not happening everywhere.





I think that you should do the math. If you realize it or not the cost of consumer electronic payments is already reflected in the cost of the products that we all buy. If there is a cost to a businessman, then that cost is passed on to the consumer. There are a number of gas stations in my area that offer discounts for cash customers, but appropriate sales taxes are still charged to the penny.

In our daily lives the Social Security Tax law, for one, does not allow employers to round down the tax. Income tax withholding is another.

The only entity that will be coming out on the short end of this deal is the consumer. Even if the vendor rounds down a purchase the state will still want its full due. In the end rounding down will be a cost of business that will be passed on to the consumer however miniscule it may be.

I'm not saying that the idea is not without merit, but there are a lot of things that have to be worked out I just see that this will be nothing more than an another hidden cost passed on to consumers (however small).