Another Attempt To Get Rid Of The Cent And Nickel In The USA

Yeah thats not gonna happen It really should cause they are useless at this point, but I do like n9jig's idea if I were the president id overhaul the coinage system and retire the cent, nickel, and dime.

i do not mind if they stop minting new ones, because well we have enough already. but to retire them from use would be stupid. that means the cents made this year would get little to no return on the investment of making them and cents are legal from 1794 forward as money so says the US Mint. halves are only made for collectors until there is a real demand, but they are still money. $5 coins minted as commemorative or whatever have that face value and can be spent for $5 if someone wants. I think those are the bullion coins, or was that $50 for those buffaloes?

how about just minting coins on the years with multiple of 5's like 2015, 2020 for cents and nickles? this would reduce the cost to make them for circulation (business strikes) like bills aren't made with every year on them but are series 2003 series 2006, etc. then for collectors they could keep making limited ones every year and just sell them through the mint.

would we run out of cents in 5 years time because people lose, throw them away, or whatever before a new batch of them could come out? would we run out of nickels? of dimes? just keep minting business strikes yearly for these dumb quarter sets and let the other coin types be minted every 5 years, and every year for collectors issues.

as someone else said US money needs a long overdue overhaul anyway. smallest coin being the smallest denomination and such, as well bills have different sizes because you know discrimination of the blind should be stopped. don't most other currencies in paper form have smaller amounts as smaller bills? and the euro-cents are sized smallet is the lowest. well 1- and 2-cent are the same size.

well that is just my crazy ideas to help cut costs and keep collectors and the populace happy.

dollar bill needs to go away for the collar coin. 18 months life is not as good as 50 years life and there is a surplus of dollar coins now so unlikely to run out of them IF people are made to use them if the one dollar bill is discontinued.

Put Lincoln on the new $2 coin.

I doubt that is entirely true and would require seeing the official study that proves that many cents are "lost" and need replacing every year. Due to the fact many people use checks and have since they began, use debit/credit/bank cards and never see actual "cash" this changes the number of people that actually have hands on the cents. now I could understand that collectors are hoarding the copper cents and that could be reducing the number in circulation, as well as pre-2006 people melted them down for the copper.

i just don't buy it anymore than I buy exoflood theory. someone is going to have to show me proof with numbers facts and trends actually recorded for me to buy that we "lose" that many cents each year to need the numbers they are made at.

I am just not buying that the number of cents is being reduced rather than increased even with copper hoarders and coin collectors today. I need to see some numbers. Hard to find due to lower mintage, but 2009 coins are out there in rolls, boxes and just normal pocket change. What I will buy is the new system for moving money like Brinks and such to distribute it may be running out in one area and needing more because they moved it to another part of the country. the part of the country they moved it to may have heavy population of copper collectors or those melting them down without caring about the 2006 law.

I do not think that slowing down mintage of cents would make them disappear from circulation. Also this does not explain nickels at all. are we "losing" that many nickels also? my bet is that it is just based on the price they wish to get rid of them, when cutting down the number of them made would be the better option like the surplus of $1 gold coins being the reason they were only made for collectors. they are easy to get anywhere so we haven't ran out of small dollars when they stopped circulating them. haven't ran out of half-dollars now that they are not circulating.

the schemes of the "state+" quarters jsut isn't making the money they hoped for because people are burnt out chasing the things. I am jsut calling shenanigans on DC.

I actually used to throw cents away--usually on park lawns for detectors to pick up. I felt bad giving them to the homeless--collect 500 or more and you can have a meal!

My family used to be a copper hoarder prior to 1980 because we had one of those change jars, but no Coinstars. The point I meant ws anyone jsut sitting on coins be it for collecting, the guy I know who owns a bar and waits until the jug is full to carry it to be counted or whatever. ALL of them are not being lost, they just sit around a lot longer than other coins.

Coinstar and such is making coin use a lot easier for many people since you no longer have to roll them to convert them into bills. Many stores are getting their own self-service machine that can take coins. Not the amount of a Coinstar machine, but you can dump in change to buy a good bit before the machine chokes on the amount. the problem is there just isn't much to do with the cent without Coinstar and the automated coin counting cashier things. they are still out there and being used, as well nickels.

I keep hearing the comparison to Canada, but to be honest, three are less Canadians that Us citizens, and a bit more sparsely populated.

USA: 309,330,000 (@88 sq mi)
Can: 34 127,000 (@8 sq mi)

these are numbers from 2010 but still they are vastly different countries that support different economies.

How will the 9/10th cent tax on gasoline be effected by the loss of a penny? will it be dropped to be more fairly rounded? did Canada have that 9/10th cent thing going on for gasoline that affects the cost of EVERYTHING shipped using gasoline powered transportation?

how will US corporations treat the rounding in regards to bills and bill collecting if it pushes their prices and things get off for people? will we face another Fanny May foul up?

Assume they just made cents for collectors, where would most of them end up? like the NIFC half-dollars would they be thrown into circulation? would the cent or nickel REALLY be demonitized in the USA?

Just because your neighbor does something and it works for them, doesn't mean it will work for you as well because you are not the same people.

That is why I said to reduce the production of cents to reduce the costs to make them. jsut make them every 5 years, find a new metal that is WAY cheaper, like every country using aluminum.

Sony but since 2009 TARP fiasco, I do NOT trust the US government to know what to do with its money at ALL, and I have barely trusted them with economics since Reagan anyway.

Also remeber, the mint is the one that said no the last time this was attempted, so it seems the Mint has power. It make take an act of congress to change coins before that lifetime of what 25 or 50 years, but who gets to decide what is money since ALL current coin types minted since @1794 are still legal as far as the Mint is concerned? (there is an exception for one modern coin type)

I just keep seeing Superman 3 and Richard Pryor's character when someone starts talking about removing the cent or some such and how the rounding will affect things. Add to that the addage, "To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer." Computers is what does the trounding and they are messing up while the cent still exists today.

There are other ways than making a dime the smallest US currency to save money. (no pun intended)

Strange, I was told by a Canadian that stores no longer take pennies a few months after they stopped making them. The law says something like cents are only able to be used for a purchase totaling under $25, so anything over $25 they cannot use cents at all. He said he thought it meant you cannot spend more than $25 in cents at a time, but if something is $25.01 then he cannot give the cent and has to give a nickel instead. Might just be like in the US where people don't do the right thing or me and him are both confused about how that limit thing works.

Does anyone have some numbers on this other that Bob's friend's uncle read something somewhere about the number of cents lost in the US annually? I might buy it more if I had something other than hearsay to go on. I really doubt the number of cents needed to be made is so high. I know that many are made, but have zero idea why and even speaking to someone at the mint, they couldn't answer, but she was able to direct me to the page with costs to make each coin, size, number of reeds on each, etc. She was even able to tell me the reason for low mintage of halves was due to "hoarding" after Kennedy died and the businesses just got rid of them from drawers and no longer use them for change. She also said to me "What about those Guam and places that would still need the penny?" I had no response to that and didn't even think about it until later reading on ehre about how 2009 coinage was sent to Panama in large numbers or something like that.

So what would happen to those territories or whatever they are called without the cent or nickel?

Cash purchases is all I make, so while it might not affect the rich with bank cards and such, losing the cent will affect many people in the US. Just happens to be those people that nobody ever thinks about, that are in the majority.

think Brinks, Loomis, Coinstar, all these places that use and see lots of coins should have some sort of records looked into to see IF the coins are being "lost" and needed in those quantities are true. Just because the FED has run out of cents, doesn't mean there isn't a giant Wells Fargo warehouse with a couple thousand tonnes of cents in it waiting for someone to request them.