Strong Support For The Penny In Recent Poll

Truth.

There's no real argument for the nickel and dime though. If the argument is purchasing power than everything below the $5 should be eliminated. The real issue with the purchasing power argument is that if you really did follow it inflation will quickly run rampant

A tenth of a dollar is a perfectly good number for our smallest unit of change. However, to prevent the waste of throwing away 50 billion quarters we need a nickel to bridge the gap. Logically we need to withdraw the current nickel and replace it with something smaller and much less expensive. Aluminum would be a good choice so we don't have toxic metals like zinc in the environment.

I usually take your meaning but not in this case.

It's illogical to remove all the smaller denominations because it would become impossible to make change. Nobody wants to pay $5 for Ramen noodles. The question is what's the largest amount of money people should have to leave behind because there's no smaller denomination. It seems to me that about 10 or 15 seconds of pay at minimum wage is a fairly good number. In any given exchange one party can be hurt but it will generally even out over the long haul. This amount of value is small enough neither party has much incentive to try to abuse it. If it were $5 then everyone would put $2.49 worth of gas in their cars every day for free. We'd have gas lines back.

A penny is worthless. It's actually less than worthless because we spend billions of dollars producing, handling, counting and hauling them out to the trash every year. We'd spend even more if we actually cleaned them up off the streets and parking lots. We make so many billions of pennies because they are less than worthless. I wonder how much money was spent to keep the penny this year or whether any money passes to get poll results like this published. It's exceedingly bad and one sided reporting so any legitimate news organ wouldn't run the story as is. How many people were bothered in their home in a telephone poll and just hung up assuming it was a phony credit card company in Pakistan? How smart on average are people who talk to strangers or pollsters on the phone now days? They can't be very smart since nearly 100% of all calls from strangers are scams and thieves.

Poll results can be anything desired. Without details (that you can believe) results are meaningless. People are lying to pollsters now days and I don't know if they'd lie about their desire for pennies or not. All we know is they are asking unknown groups of people unknown questions and then claiming they want pennies. And they are getting paid big numbers to get the right results from their polls which wouldn't have been reported if the results were different. This looks like more "Soup of the Day Science" and the reported results are meaningless.

The government wants to get rid of cash so these questions are all moot anyway.

I agree. And as long as we have the quarter we need to keep the nickel unless we really want to break some brains.

That was honestly my point though. The argument used to get rid of a lot of the smaller denominations especially when someone starts mentioning nickels and dimes, really applies basically all the way up to the $5 or I guess technically the $2 because there is essentially no purchasing power below that. Even the dollar menus require more than a dollar after tax. The whole purchasing power argument holds no weight with me considering the function that change plays

Already we can't get exactly a gallon of gas because it costs $2.89 and 9/10c.

Does this mean everyone always loses a quarter of a teaspoon worth of gas with every gallon? No! It doesn't matter how much it costs per gallon because the price is rounded off to the nearest penny. Sometimes you get an extra quarter teaspoon and sometimes you lose a quarter teaspoon. This way we don'y have to fiddle around with coins worth even less than the less than worthless cent.