Opinions: Is America Ready For A Brown Nickel?

Just like everything else any government does, they will tell us it's for our own good (saving taxpayers $11 million a year, Nickel metal allergy can cause itching to 10% of the population). Then they will shove it down our throat and demand we thank them for it.

Here's another thing has any Canadian seen any impact in their tax return since they saved you $11 million a year, or did they just raise the rates a little less then they had planed?

I'm still trying to get over the penny being gone. It's sad that we had it decided for us. It was also a mini inflation jump because you know stores took advantage of the rounding off to the nickle to raise prices to their advantage. Also that if you pay with any kind of plastic you still pay to the penny. Thank God I can still get silver coins.

Interesting. To me it seems like a compromise to eliminate the cent. It should placate Jarden, allowing them to shift their zinc product from cent to five cent planchets.

However, I believe that we really need to eliminate both the cent and nickel from circulation. People will just have to deal with it, like we have before. The nickel has less purchasing power than the half-cent when it was eliminated.

Like they did with the small sized dollar.



Even if it does work for the nickel it will be just a temporary stop gap measure. It currently cost close to 9 cents to produce each five cent piece and almost 4 cents of that is production cost not materials. So the copper plated zinc would have to cost less than 1 cent to make it profitable. Even if it is now that can't last and in a year or so we will be right back in the same spot we are now losing money on every five cent piece made. Production costs for the cent are from 1 to 1.4 cents apiece not including materials so there is NO material that would make cents a non-losing proposition. They would cost more than their face value even if the material was free.



Even worse they would have to be calibrated to accept BOTH types of coinage. Probably something the current mechanisms can't do. That would mean all new mechanisms that would have to be developed after the mint finally makes their announcements about the changes.

Frankly it would be much simpler, easier, and cheaperto just eliminate the cent and five cent and leave the alloy of the rest of the coins alone.

Just had an awesome idea, why not make the new nickel with the same composition as the new plated steel canadian nickel? Vending machine components for accepting those are already widely available and those same machines are programmed to also take the old 1982-1999 nickels that have the same composition as our current US nickels. Also this new zinc "nickel" that they are proposing wouldn't really be brown as much as black and green... yuck.

Actually they are trying to profit. It is called seinorage and is the profit they make when the sell the coins at face value to the banks. I am also pretty sure when you see the published "cost" of making any coin, it takes into account the labor and machinery overhead. My guess for the prefered use of Zinc...

Lower cost to manufacture + low survivability in circulation = have to make more coins more often

Making more coins more often when they cost less to make than face value = more profits for the government hobgoblins

Let's pretend for a moment that both a cupronickel and zinc made five cent piece cost exactly the same to manufacture @ 4¢ each.

If you make 500,000,000 cupronickel 5¢ pieces the seinorage is $5,000,000...a tidy profit. And let's pretend they last 100 years and none are lost to carelessness...that every one of the 500,000,000 remain in circulation for 100 years, the treasury makes five million dollars

Now if you make 500,000,000 zinc 5¢ pieces which last ten years and assuming the same rules as above, none are lost to carelessness, you would need to make another 500,000,000 coins in ten years, or over the same 100 years....make 5,000,000,000 coins for a seinorage of $50,000,000.....this is the government people...which do you think they will choose?

i reuse my cents coins all the time. when I get something and it is like $1.08 I will pay with all pennies for the 8 cents. sometimes I even pay using rolls of cents.