Another "Down With The Cent" Article...boo

Can you even FIND a well worn cent from the last 25 years? Worn not rotted or corroded from environmental damage. No because these things don't really circulate. A 25 year old nickel, dime, or quarter typicall shows good honest wear. These coins have been doing their job But a 25 years old cent may be darkened from oxidation of the copper, be they aren't worn. All of these billions of cents were made at great expense. . . .to be thrown in jars.

WE DON"T NEED THEM!

"Well worn" is an exaggeration but you can sometimes see one with definite wear on it. These are usually only XF at worst but I've seen an XF- or two. This wear represents dozens of transactions and loss each time it was used.

There are billions upon billions of pennies representing significant loss in aggregate.

We keep talking about needing jobs and wanting to do it with sense.

How about this idea... Stop making the cent, nickel, dime, quarter. Keep the dollar coins, but kill the paper dollar!

Make a Half Dime, dime, and a half out of steel using different sizes. That would be 1/20, 1/10, 1/2 dollar coins... basically moving us to the nice size fractions... so we can kill the Half Dime off when it is needed, then the dime, then the half.

Now make the different sizes so people have to switch and redeem all the copper, zinc, copper nickel coins at face. These coins can be melted to recover the metal value which is greater than the cost to make a replacement coin.

We could make say a few extra mints to handle the production which would create jobs.

We would fix a problem with our coins, create jobs, make a profit doing it, and save money in the future.


The only people that will throw a fit is the vending machine people... and we can let them have a tax credit for the retooling to stupid them up. The profit from the change should be more than enough to pay for the credit. Plus look at all the US steel you are using... I bet some people in Ohio/PA area would like that.

-SWUSC