The U.S. stopped making cents the day we elected Barack Obama.
I think this is a good move. Now, if only we could stop gas stations from listing prices in fractions of a cent...
Everything will be rounded up to the higher nickel.
A penny saved is a penny earned....
Well, there are a couple of things which come to mind here.
1. All transactions will be rounded to the nearest 5 cent amont. Even after they calculate sales tax, that’s how all prices will be recorded.
2. Considering that so many retailers, even small retailers, take debit cards nowadays, it’s possible that this won’t create such a problem with the lack of pennies in circulation. The lack of pennies might just encourage more use of debit cards to avoid the whole problem of making change and all that.
Naw...They’ll just fix it to roll it up to the nearest nickel. Sounds profitable for the gov...they’ll do it!!!!
I’ve been anti-penny for at least a decade. They should be made illegal as an impediment to commerce. They are not worth the time retail operations and consumers spend on them.
Apparently AAFES overseas quit doing them at least that long ago, perhaps some of our military FReepers might comment.
The nickle will become the new cent. Eventually it will become defunct, and the dime will be the new cent. Sales tax increases will be a doozie.
KILL THE DOLLAR BILL!
They’re filthy carriers of disease, bacteria, etc..
Their life-span is measured in months, after which they’re shredded, and dumped in landfills.
Coins last decades, and the metal can be recycled.
If I get a really grungy one, I pass it off as quickly as possible, and then wash my hands!
THEY’RE FILTHY!
OK,that’s cool...Canada’s doing away with the penny.If Canadians think that that’s in their best interests there’s no problem in my eyes.I think that if *we* did away with *our* penny we’d all be at least a little poorer...literally.I’m willing to incur a little extra expense,tax-wise,and a little bit of bother (all those pennies in the drawer),to keep it around.
our gov’t stopped making sense (sic) years ago...
As long as there is a sales tax, we’ll need the one cent coin.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In Canada , currency has been so politicized by the left , that new bills are multi colored and so plastic they would melt before they burned. Also coins have been minted dedicated to ever leftist whacko and their causes, who have done nothing but passed liberal ideological gas consistently for several decades. Currency has also become all about “feeling” you see. Above all Canadians want to feel good aboout themselves, and part of that is having this “wow” currency and coinage.
As a practical matter doing away with cent production is premature, for when the US economy goes South, as it surely will, Obama is doing everything he can to bring it about , without seeming to “really” do so,deflation will make the lowly cent much more significant. Flaherty is functionally correct for the present, but not for the future. He is also looking for ways to cut minting costs to offset the millions of dollars spent in producing Canada’s new “wow “ plastic/paper currency, which really has become the latest government purple people eater, under the guise of preventing couterfeiting, and the tremendous volume of new currencey issued, to dilute the Canadian dollar continually to keep it under valued, slightly less than US currency in order to acheive favorable balance of trade figures with the USA.This is to keep up with the massive volume of printed currency the US mint has printed as a result of quantitative easing, i.e print. print , print the US dollar, and Canada has to keep up.Flaherty is clearly feeling the cost pressure of doing so, rather than allowing the Canadian dollar to be valued higher than the US dollar.
This makes little sense ( cents).
In the 1950’s a pack of gum or a candy bar (my guides at the time) cost a nickel. Today, they cost over 10 times that. The CPI in the 1950’s was 23; today it’s 230.
So, today’s dime is yesterday’s penny. It’s really that simple. Do away with pennies and nickels and, in a stroke of foresight given that Obama/Geitner/Bernanke’s economic mismanagement is likely to cause inflation to accelerate, also drop the dime. Nobody uses them unless they have to anyway because they don’t buy anything on their own anymore.
Round everything to the nearest quarter, and make a new quarter about the size of a nickel. Drop the fifty-cent piece, and dollar bills, $5 bills and $10 dollar bills and issue two dollar coins and ten dollar coins.
Instead of six coins (penny, nickel, dime, quarter, fifty-cent and dollar) we’d be down to three (quarters, two-dollars and ten-dollars) and we’d no longer be printing millions of $1 and $5 bills every year.
If you make an $8 purchase with 5% sales tax, the price would be $8.40, rounded up to $8.50, pay with a $10 coin (or five $2 ones) and get six quarters in return (the size of nickels).
If you make a $7 purchase with 5% sales tax, the price would be $7.35, rounded down to $7.25, and pay with four $2 coins and get three quarters in change. Or pay with a $10 coin and get a $2 coin and three quarters.
If you routinely carried 8 to 10 quarters (today’s equivalent of 10 nickels in size) and a few $2 coins (about the size of today’s quarters), and stocked your wallet with $20 bills and $50 bills, you’d be able to carry out the normal cash transaction without a hassle.
The government would save tens of millions of dollars of issuing costs per year, of which I’d like, say, a .01% cut for proposing this if it’s adopted. (The government would also benefit because every coin they sold when issuing additional currency would be sold at a tremendous profit margin, instead of the present losses they incur.)
I havent used coins for years. If I get change back from a cash purchase it goes in the coin purse or the church offering. Most purchases are plastic where I earn free travel or hotel nights. I suppose I leaned to do without coins from five years in Afgahnistan where everything was paper money down to the 1 Afghani note (2 cents).
So that means your taxes just went up 4%. You don’t expect anyone to round down to the lowest nickel unless they owe YOU money,do you?
Does this mean I will no longer find Canadian pennies in my change? Perhaps Canadians will start getting stuck with US pennies. It would only be fair!
The Talking Heads were about 20 years ahead of everybody on this one.
I sense two agendas:
1) Raise taxes by rounding up.
2) Move us all into government-tracked payment cards.
If we get rid of it here, I won’t need a key board with the ¢ on it any more.
Ban pennies and round up to the nearest nickel. Pennies made sense when a 1 pound candy bar was a nickle. There is absolutely no reason today for using pennies. Nobody complained 100 years ago when every transaction was rounded to a penny instead of a mil (1/10 cent).
The dollar has lost 97% of its value since 1913. A nickle today buys what 2/10ths of a penny bought in 1913. A penny in 1913 bought what would cost $0.35 today.
My point is, today’s nickle is a smaller real-world denomination of currency than a penny was in 2013. It is nothing.
Ban pennies, round to the nearest nickel and call it good, start issuing $2.50 bills.