Not gonna lie, I agree with this. Pennies are useless.
You know what they say, “even a broken penny is right twice a dollar”
Or something like that
Thanks to Trump, America doesn’t make any cents.
Slow clap…
The reason we continued to make the penny is to maintain zinc production, which is important for wartime manufacturing.
By ending penny production, it will save money, but may compromise our future ability to wage war.
If we want to have artificially-generated demand for zinc – if we really need to ensure domestic production capacity – there’s no requirement for it to be the penny. I’m sure that we can find something else to make out of zinc.
The penny itself wasn’t always zinc. I don’t remember the changeover year.
checks WP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)
The current copper-plated zinc cent issued since 1982 weighs 2.5 grams, while the previous 95% copper cent still found in circulation weighed 3.11 g (see further below).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc
Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent,[123] and galvanization (coating of iron or steel) is the most familiar form. In 2009 in the United States, 55% or 893,000 tons of the zinc metal was used for galvanization.[122]
Zinc is more reactive than iron or steel and thus will attract almost all local oxidation until it completely corrodes away.
We can just subsidize zinc production, or purchase something that requires those anti-corrosion properties.
I also am not at all sure that this was in fact the rationale. I can’t find a reference online to this being the rationale. I do see reference to zinc being useful because it’s particularly inexpensive. And the numbers given on this article seem to support the idea that pennies don’t really work out to generating a very substantial demand for zinc.
It’s Not Big Zinc Behind The Campaign To Keep The Penny
To run through the numbers, a penny coin weighs 2.5 grammes. Let’s call that all zinc (it’s not, but close enough). There’s 5 billion made a year, meaning that we’ve got 12,500,000,000 grammes, or divide by a million to get 12,500 tonnes. Now, if that were 12,500 tonnes of gold being made into coins every year, with global virgin production being around 3,000 tonnes, then sure, that would be a contract worth, umm, influencing the political process, to secure and keep running. The same would be true of many metals in fact. But it’s just not true of the zinc industry. Using the USGS, the correct source for these sorts of numbers, we find that US production of zinc is around 250,000 tonnes a year, global production 13.5 million. Even if we assume (as we might, sounds like the sort of thing that might be true) that US coins must be made of US produced metal this is still a very marginal part of the total market.
Further, zinc runs about $2,200 a tonne at present, meaning that we’re talking about maybe $25 million a year as the zinc cost of our pennies. And we’re told who and how much is paid to keep lobbying for the penny:
But his written statement did not mention that Weller is actually a lobbyist and head of strategic communications for Dentons, a law firm representing the interests of zinc producer Jarden Zinc Products, a major provider of coin blanks that are made into currency.
…
Jarden Zinc Products spent $1.5 million from 2006 through the first quarter of 2014 lobbying on such things as “issues related to the one-cent coin” and represented by Weller when he worked at B&D Consulting and, more recently, Dentons.No, the important point here is not the zinc industry, nor “Big Zinc”. The important part is this “a major provider of coin blanks”. If your business is making coin blanks then obviously you’re very interested in the continued existence of coin demoninations that are made from coin blanks. That they’re made from zinc is an irrelevance compared to that.
Believe me, you don’t spend the best part of $200,000 a year in lobbying expenses in order to sell $25 million’s worth of zinc. This metal is a commodity, you can sell that amount in one ten minute phone call to any London Metals Exchange ring member. Heck, give me a couple of days to get organised and I could sell it for you at the market price. I’d also charge rather less than $200,000 to do it.
EDIT: WP seems to also support the author’s argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarden_Zinc_Products
The company has resisted past efforts to eliminate the penny in the United [1] through an astroturf lobby organization called Americans for Common Cents.
The company’s largest source of revenue comes from the production of coin blanks, having produced over 300 billion blanks at their Tennessee facility.
tonnes
grammes
Did an Old English speaker write this?
I’m fairly sure that I’ve read some articles by this guy on Forbes before, because I remember that he had some article on something, many years back, that I really liked and I distinctly remember thinking that his thumbnail looked kind of frumpy. I believe that he’s British. Looks like he hasn’t been at Forbes in almost a decade, though.
kagis
Yeah, was apparently born in Torquay, England.
https://www.timworstall.com/2008/07/about-tim-worstall/
I was born in Torquay in 1963, grew up mostly in Bath (with a couple of years in Naples, Italy as a result of my father\’s Naval career) and was educated at Downside Abbey.
EDIT: Also, a “ton” and a “tonne” aren’t the same thing – that’s not just dialect. A “ton” here in the US means a short ton, 2000 US lbs. A “tonne” is a metric ton, 1000 kg. I don’t know what Brits normally mean if they write “ton”, whether it’s a short ton or a long ton or metric ton. In the US, we’d normally write “metric ton” instead of “tonne”.
Kagi is a for-profit website that charges people money to use their search engine.
Stop advertising for them.
Advertising does not belong on Lemmy and I will point this out every time I see you do it.
Calling that an advertisement for Kagi seems a bit hyper reactive to me. I think they’re just including it as a source along with the info for transparency’s sake. I appreciate it for the context it provides.
If they didn’t explicitly do it every single times, and often italicize it, I might agree.
And then they wrote some ad copy for why Kagi is better than DuckDuckGo to me afterward because they decided (for some reason) that this was about which search engine was better, as if I gave a shit. Which, again, advertising.
Well yeah, italicizing it denotes that it’s the title of the source.
The “ad copy” was just them explaining why they personally like using Kagi, after you called them out for it.
With all that said, I think you’ll just end up Streisand effecting it in the end if you call it out over and over. 🤷♂️
You’re free to comment every time if you want. I have no intention to change what I am doing, because I happen to like them, and my use of the term predates my use of that engine – I wrote googles prior to this.
If you want to ban me because you cannot tolerate my writing style, do so, and I’ll go use communities other than those you that you moderate. Trying to harass me into changing what I write is not going to have an effect.
Yes, I understand you think, “hail corporate!” is a good thing, as is giving a corporation that would happily fuck you over in a second like every other corporation free advertising, and “I gave a different for-profit corporation free advertising before now” is a weird excuse to continue to do it.
Too bad there aren’t any non-profit search engines you could promote instead of the one that charges people money in order to make a profit.
But yes, I will point it out your “hail corporate!” shit every time because advertising does not belong on Lemmy.
Too bad there aren’t any non-profit search engines you could promote instead of the one that charges people money in order to make a profit.
If I remember from prior discussions, you prefer Duck Duck Go. If you want to mention that you use Duck Duck Go, I have no problem with that. I think that that’s great.
giving a corporation that would happily fuck you over in a second like every other corporation
I think that Kagi has considerably less-incentive to do so than Duck Duck Go does, because they have a viable revenue model that doesn’t involve datamining me the way Google does or showing ads to me the way Duck Duck Go does. Yes, you can use an ad-blocker on Duck Duck Go, but then you’re offloading the costs onto other users who don’t do that, and in the long run, Duck Duck Go has an incentive to block users using ad blockers.
You may disagree with my assessment. But I’ve made that decision, I’m happy with it, I like the fact that Kagi added a Threadiverse search feature, and I am not going to change search engines to your favorite search engine, nor do I intend to stop telling people that I use Kagi.
So as soon as the zinc lobbyist pay him, he’ll back out.
What portion of our zinc production goes to manufacturing pennies?
someone tell him he’s just copying canada now
Maybe he should think of joining Canada instead of trying to take us over.
Nothing wrong with taking a good idea and following it yourself.
But from the person who likes to think he’s always leading and not just a little bitch, anybody pointing it out probably gets ousted.
Pennies should go away, but this isn’t the way to do it. Canada’s process was well thought out with lots of guidance and direction.
This is dumb and will cause lots of confusion.
Yes instead of no longer making them, there is a better way
Holy fucking shit, a broken clock moment?
To be fair, honestly, I’d like to think that Fascists at least know that $0.03 > $0.01 is a bad trade.
We Finns don’t use the 1c or 2c denominations in euro coins. If you use cash, it gets rounded to the nearest 5c.
As in 10.02 becomes 10.00, 10.03 becomes 10.05.
If you pay with card, no rounding.
When buying gas when younger you’d always see that it’s 2 cents or 7 cents the sum on the meter ends on.
I think like more someone in his government thought they need to do something people don’t hate and the only reasonable thing Trump didn’t have a tantrum about when it was brought up was the futility of the existence of pennies.
DOGE is shooting for optics, not actual savings. Cutting penny production is about $90M out of the $6.1T deficit. Which isn’t as useful to the American people as the headline is for DOGE. Their goal is to get one of these headlines every month to make it look like they’re doing something useful.
But 70% of our deficit is: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military, and Interest payments on debt.
- They can’t cut interest payments, period.
- They won’t cut military, obviously, but there is probably a lot of low hanging fruit here that they should be scrutinizing.
- They might cut SS or Medi*, predictably eating the faces of their base.
And if they cut literally everything except for these, we’d still run over a $4T deficit. Meanwhile, the quality of life for Americans by cutting all that will get measurably worse.
So yeah, more likely is that they’ll keep aiming for random little optics opportunities, while trying to find ways to funnel more of this money to Musk and his buddies via govt contracts.
Or assume they’re only pretending to save money and it’s all about crippling our government…
Yes, that’s exactly the point I made.
What part of the deficit is Social Security? It’s self-funded, no?
The boomer generation is getting old. There are more people drawing from SS than paying into it.
- As a result, social security has been running a deficit since 2010
- In 2023 social security made up 1.3T, or ~20% of our deficit.
- According to a report last year, at this rate the social security fund will deplete in 2035
Does that include all the money "borrowed"from SS, or the interest that is supposed to be paid for the “borrowed” money?
I do not claim to be an expert on this, just some dude with the internet, so answering that is going to be a team effort.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “borrowed” here. Do you mean money borrowed by the Treasury, or by people?
Trump thinks pennies are useless because he wasn’t allowed to use them in a strip club.
I’ve been throwing pennies away for years. Now I got to throw away nickels? Trump ruins another thing I liked.
I’ll take your pennies!
This will require rounding up to the nearest nickel… Which costs $0.14 to make 🙄
why does it take an executive order from someone like Donald Trump to do this? I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s any developed country that has a smaller denomination note. in my shithole country they simply round up to the nearest $1000
The penny, one of the first coins made by the U.S. Mint after its establishment in 1792, now costs more than two cents to produce, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site shortly after departing the Super Bowl game in New Orleans.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
While I think that it’s probably something that we should have done a long time ago, I don’t think that the major cost is actually the fact that the production cost is higher than the coin’s face value, but from the cost of needing to handle and process pennies.
Cool, I think this is a good idea.
Idk if it’ll save any money, costs pennies to manufacture
I bring forth, “the pee pee!”
A durable replacement for the penny…a Plastic Penny! “Pee, pee!” Get it?
