US Legislation Seeks Steel Cents And Nickels

This is an interesting subject.Personally I like the Lincoln Cent snd the Jefferson nickel,but I'm a collector.

Ohio's number one source of income:

- Mining industry followed by natural gas.

- Ohio leads all other states inthe production of building sandstone and in the production of lime,made from limestone to produce cement,chemicals,fertilzer and STEEL.

And this would be the answer to why steel pennies and nickels.

Maybe I was a little hasty in my "eliminate" statement...how about make them NIFC like the half dollars and soon-to-be Presidential dollars? Mint the Cent and Nickel for profit for collectors?

If it will save the tax payer and government money then I'm all for it. Personally, I don't care what modern circulating coins are made of. I collect the old stuff.

Anything the government gets its hands on is due to waste of money....Can anyone name me anything that the Government has run effeciently? The Government could start a paper penny program and it would still cost more than a penny to make.

How about just leave it as is? To eliminate the penny would mean total restructure of pricing and tax rates. NOT a smart thing to do.

I am not sure that this is even about pork for the steel industry as much as it is a classic misdirection ploy. A plan to "save millions!" while we waste billions on military spending and home security that does nothing to accomplish our goals or protect our fighting men & women. Doing anything with the cent other than eliminating it is a waste of money, even if the material is free, it costs more than a cent to make. The fact that the current material cost is only one half of a cent actually says that there is no need to do anything about the cent at this time anyway. Only the nickel actually needs attention because it is worth more than its face value, which the cent is not. It is not total cost of manufacture that is important. When we were issuing silver and gold coinage during fixed "spot" times, the coins contained their face value of silver and gold and certainly cost something to mint so they always cost more to make than face value but were not worth more as metal. A change to steel is probably not the best way to fix the nickel either, surely there is some way to produce a coin that remains mostly copper but has just enough trace alloy to turn it white while staying under five cents of material value. I see nothing wrong with having coins that contain their face value in metal content, that is after all what we always used to do. The only reason that you don't normally want the content value to exceed face value is to prevent, or at least minimize, the melting of the coins by criminals to profit from the public money supply (something congress seems perfectly happy to allow the banking and finance industries to do). If it was not for that possibility, there is no harm in having a coin that is worth more as metal than its face. People who are hoarding copper cents with the hope of making a killing are delusional at best, a ton of pennies has a face value of about $3000 so to make $100,000 profit when those coins have five cents of copper in them, you need over 16,000 pounds of cents and a law that lets you sell them as scrap. Bottom line for me, there is no need to change anything about the coinage, leave it as it is. Congress should spend precisely zero time on this issue and should tackle the real issues. We will never balance the budget a million dollars at a time, we need to be thinking on the 10 to 100 billion dollar scale. Everything else is just a smoke screen to keep us from seeing that nothing is being done at that level. Does the mint as a whole cost anything to operate, NO, end of discussion.

Have you bought any pre cut firewood lately? It can be outrageous!