Get Rid of the Penny...

One of the dumber things I've read here in a while.



You think its smarter to pay more than 5 cents to mint a nickel? Or would it be smarter to get rid of the penny and the nickel but keep the dime?

The rounding to the nearest quarter part was what got me. If you round up, consumers will literally pay millions more for goods and services than they should. If you round down, businesses lose millions more than they should.


Hardly so. Whether or not a transaction is rounded up or down is random and will occur 50% of the time one way and 50% of the time the other. Statistically, for there to be millions of dollars of difference either way in one year, there would have to be literally trillions of transactions over a year.


We already round off to the nearest penny. Does anyone complain about the millions of dollars worth of gas that consumers aren't getting?

I don't mind scrapping the penny, but I don't see a good reason to scrap anything higher.

The nickel also costs more money to mint than its face value - metals are only going to get more and more expensive as the value of the nickel goes down. Its going to happen one day anyway.

There's WAY better ways to cut government spending than to get rid of our coin.

Sure, in fact, I think we should mint more coin and less paper. But the coins should be high value coins, like a $1, $2, or $5 coin - and we should rid ourselves of the penny nickel and dime.

Since you're ok with consumers or businesses losing so much with your logic, than you should be ok with cutting some entitlement spending too, right? I mean, afterall, waste is waste.


You're OK with consumers and businesses "losing" money that way, too, because you don't support the half penny.




Take the total number of transactions you conduct in a year. Call that N. Call the plus or minus range of your gain or loss through rounding A. And call the size of the rounding error S.

A = S * sqrt( N )

For N = 1000 and S = 0.125 (the maximum error due to rounding is the smallest coin amount divided by two), that's less than 4 bucks over a year. Its less than 13 bucks over 10 years - (set N = 10*1000)

and less than 31 bucks over an entire adult life span.


You're arguing over whether or not you will gain or lose 31 bucks over your entire life.
 
Collectors would have a lot to say about getting rid of any coins.
 

Forum List

Back
Top