Bring Back The 2-Cent Coin

All this does it make it painfully clear the dollar has lost value. How much value you ask? One cent in 1909 would today purchase 14 cents in value today. In real language we can all understand. The dollar can now purchase 4 cents in value. It has lost 96 cents per dollar in purchasing power. Why? The United States government spends money it doesn't have and continues to do so. The government devalues the dollar to pay the bills that are due in cheaper dollars. This has been a long standing practice that both polictical parties sign off on.

Not sure I follow the math on the 1 penny = 14 cents, followed by the $1 = 4 cents example, but I agree the money isn't worth what it use to be.

I like the suggestion that we dump the small change and add new coinage for higher denominations. Let's go straight to $1, $2, $5, $10, $20 and $50 silver, and $100, $500, $1,000 and $5,000 gold coins. If we must have paper money, we could reinstitute paper currency for $500, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000 and $100,000 denominations.

I think we need to get rid of the cent sometime fairly soon. I wouldn't actually be a fan, because then I couldn't roll hunt for wheats any more! The cost combined with the current economic situation means that we're probably going the way of the 5 cent rounding, IMO.

What is interesting about this thread is it seems like common knowledge that our currency has lost value. I would argue that the pace that it is losing value is increasing. However, if you look at the CPI which is suppose to be a measure of inflation, you would believe, at least in the recent past, we have no inflation and the money is keeping it's value. Unfortunately, as we all know from trying to stretch our dollars, nothing is further from the truth.

usc96, Peter Schiff discusses the CPI and how it's tweaked to disguise the true inflation in his book, Crashproof.

Like you said...all I know is my OJ is getting more expensive, so is my bread and many other things.

I remember when you could get 100 pc. of candy for a dollar but then, I didn't have a dollar but I did have somewhere between a nickel and ten cents when I went to the "penny candy store".

Some of the candy was
jawbreakers and Fireballs
swedish fish
licorice
flying saucers
big malted speckled eggs.
wax lips, wax mustaches, wax teeth
wax tubes of colored syrup drinks and they had em in soda bottle shapes too.
pretzel sticks
2 wild cherries on a string ( in February for Washington's Birthday )
They called em nigger babies right on the box ( honest to gawd, they were licorice sugar sprinkled black chewy babies )
Tootsie rolls and Tootsie Pops
They had a piece of paper that had dots stuck on them too that they rolled out and tore off and you would eat the dots of different colors right off the paper.
candy cigarettes and these were stuck together in 3's with pink coloring on the end.
You could get bubble gum cigarettes too and if you blew out the powdery stuff it looked like real smoke.

Today kids can't do the math to go to a store and get change in 2 and Three Cent coins, not only that the cash registers don't know how to do it either.

The CPI is definitely a fiction. For ages it has claimed around 3% a year. I run a carpet shop and we keep getting letters from our suppliers telling us that due to rising cost for raw materials our prices are going up 8 - 10%. And we get this letter EVERY THREE TO FOUR MONTHS. We are experiencing 30% inflation per year and have been for at least the past four years. Our costs have tripled in four years. Material I used to sell at $12 a yard retail now costs me $18 a yard wholesale. The CPI is a joke.