You might have missed it in the overwhelming barrage of executive orders, courts over turning them, and Trump and Musk defying the courts and doing them anyway, but somewhere in there was an order to stop the minting of the US penny. Say it isn't so!
...wait a minute. Say about time, instead! The penny has been completely worthless for years, well over a decade or two. The penny has so little buying power that it isn't worth the time for even a poor person to pick one up.
The previous lowest coin was the half-cent. It was withdrawn in 1857. The stated reason was that the buying power of it had fallen so low that it didn't make any sense to mint it anymore. How much buying power did it have at the time? In modern money, about 15 cents. 15 cents! Yet the US mint considered that too little to continue minting. By that logic, not only should we stop minting the penny, but also the nickel and the dime.
Ah as a coin guy, it pains me to see how mismanaged it all was. They should have stopped minting the penny in the 1950s, should have withdrawn the $1 bill and switched to dollar coins only. Then around the 80s, they should have introduced a $5 coin and stopped printing the banknote and meanwhile should have stopped minting the nickel. We could still have a handful of coins with the same buying power as we always did, but by being stuck in tradition and never wanting to update things, it all fell apart.
Oh well, doesn't matter. Even in Japan, cash is dying and everyone pays with credit, debit, or one of the many digital payment options.
Aside from the low buying power argument (which didn't actually factor in Trump's decision), there is the fact that the penny requires 3.69 cents to make. Doesn't seem to make much sense there...
Incidentally, the nickel costs 13.77 cents to mint, so it isn't doing very well from a cost performance standpoint either. Like I said, the US should have eliminated both of them a long time ago....
Across the ocean, Japan stopped minting the 1 yen coin a few years ago. At the time the coin was roughly equal to the penny, tho it has fallen to roughly half a penny since. They really need to stop minting the 5¥ coin next... But baby steps, I suppose, on both sides of the ocean.
Anyway, what do you guys thing? Good decision? Bad decision? Pointless decision?
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Mastodon. |
