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Ass pennies guy in shambles
No. They’re money. Just deposit it in the bank
Now? They literally haven’t been Worth fishing out of the couch instead of just vacuuming up and toss the lot for years.
If someone throws out enough of them it should in theory help with inflation, but I doubt that many of them would ever be melted down or thrown away
It would actually do next to nothing if the entire supply were vanished right now. There’s about $300 billion in pennies in circulation. Around $850 per American, or roughly four days of average individual consumer spending.
The economy as a whole does on the order of 10s of trillions of dollars of activity a day.
Eliminating every penny would be less than a 1% reduction in liquidity, and even smaller in terms of actual use.$850 a week sounds a little nuts to me, let alone 4 days, and not in consumer spending.
10s of trillions of dollars of activity a day
Our entire GDP isn’t $30T yet. I’m really questioning these numbers.
Oh, it’s definitely far bigger than GDP. Not all financial activity factors into GDP but it’s all part of the general movement of money that factors into inflation.
A lot of money is used for things that aren’t counted as “production”, like investments or used goods.
More than half of the worlds trade is conducted in dollars and there’s even larger flows of money involved in foreign exchange on a daily basis.
There’s just so much money churning around that reducing the supply by $300B isn’t a big dent, particularly when most of it’s already effectively out of circulation.The ~$200 a day figure is right from bls and tracks consumer spending, notably including housing costs.
https://www.bls.gov/cex/.
It’s about $100 a day if you remove housing and transportation. About $25 on food and $10 on “fun” a day, with $16 of that food being consumed groceries.$850 in 4 days is total yearly spending averaged daily, which only requires a household income of $80k/year.
$29T can be described as tens of trillions, that isn’t wrong at all?
GDP is yearly, not daily
Should get rid of the nickel too.
The way inflation is going we won’t need coins at all.
Maybe instead of getting rid of the penny, we should simply redenominate the currency. You simply issue new versions of every denomination of currency and declare that their legal value is 100x the value of the old counterpart. So the new penny is legally worth an old dollar. Think of it as “US dollar v. 2.0.”
People get antsy when you suggest this sort of thing, as often it’s seen in countries experiencing hyperinflation. But it need not be. Countries with perfectly healthy economies could benefit to redenominate their currency every century or so. Even modest rates of inflation add up over time. If you want your currency’s value to remain reasonable, (ex: to avoid having to pay a million dollars for a cheeseburger some day.), eventually you do have to redonominate your currency.
Rationally, there’s really no reason not to do it. I wonder if it’s pride more than anything else that prevents us from doing it more often. It would be quite a mental adjustment to go from having a salary of $100k per year in the old system to $1,000 a year in the new one. Maybe that can’t help but make people feel smaller in some way? Even if rationally you can know that you haven’t lost anything, would you still feel poorer if you used to make $100k, but now only make 1k?
Nah. Your government is doing the right thing here.
Two reasons to not redenominate currency:
- It’s messy. The old and new coins need to coexist for some time, and people get confused. Specially bad in the presence of disingenuous = dumb = malicious actors; picture your typical Karen saying “it doesn’t specify in which currency it should be, so I’m entitled to pay it in the old currency! I DEMAND TO TALK WITH YOUR MANAGER!!!”.
- It’s costly. Reprinting all money would cost more than just stop minting the lowest value coins, and slowly remove them from circulation (as they hit the banks).
Because of both things, you’ll only see redenomination without hyperinflation once in a blue moon; it’s simply not worth the trouble, unless you’re cutting off three zeroes or more at once. Also, note trying to solve one of the issues makes the other worse.
Source: I’ve seen my country’s currency being redenominated twice. (Technically four times, but I was too young to remember two of them.)
Sounds logical, but emotionally I’m repelled. Anyone know economics can speak to this?
How about their worth in copper?
On that note, are they easy to recycle?
That would be great except they are made of zinc.
That’s why I eat them to stave off my next cold. Just as good as Zicam!
Melt it all down, let it seperate by mass, pour into molds. Energy consumed may not be worth it though.
The old ones are copper, not that sorting through a haystack of pennies trying to find the 3.5c needle is a productive use of time
Same thing that happened to the 2 dollar bill right? Still usable as currency but no longer made.
$2 bills are still printed!
