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The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

(www.cnn.com)
460 points andrewl | 5 comments | 12 Nov 25 16:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.337s | source
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throw0101d ◴[12 Nov 25 18:02 UTC] No.45903431[source]▶
So Obama wanted to wanted to ban the penny, but it was deemed illegal to do so and efforts to get rid of the law requiring it did not pass:

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/10/trump-us-mi...

* https://www.local3news.com/obama-wants-to-retire-the-penny-b...

It's not that keeping the penny around is (necessarily) a good idea, but that there are, you know, laws, and people (including the President and cabinet folks) should kind of follow those laws. So has the law been amended to not require the minting of the penny anymore?

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-order-scrap-penny-make-cent...

* https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/nx-s1-5292082/trump-penny-min...

Is there some 'new interpretation' that has been 'found' that allows Sec. Treasury to not mint pennies? Or is this change one made by fiat / executive order?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...

There's only semi-consideration been given to this; the retailers want official rules passed on how round should be done

* https://www.rila.org/focus-areas/finance/main-street-busines...

For example, one subtly:

> Ensure rounding for cash customers does not violate terms of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The SNAP program sensibly requires that SNAP customers cannot be treated differently than other customers.2 These provisions prohibit treating SNAP customers less favorably or more favorably than other customers. That means that rounding the price of food for a cash customer in either direction risks creating a violation of SNAP regulations for stores that participate in the SNAP program.

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rando001111 ◴[12 Nov 25 18:15 UTC] No.45903639[source]▶
to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
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1. kjkjadksj ◴[12 Nov 25 18:39 UTC] No.45904041[source]▶
I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing
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2. rando001111 ◴[12 Nov 25 19:51 UTC] No.45905427[source]▶
This is one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none. Wasting money is bad. I should not have to explain further.
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3. jrmg ◴[12 Nov 25 20:15 UTC] No.45905838[source]▶
A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility.

It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes.

...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of exchange that signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less to make than they do.

4. daedrdev ◴[12 Nov 25 20:16 UTC] No.45905868[source]▶
I would prefer if we do not spend billions of dollars each year on pennies when we could do something actually productive with that money.

People do not reuse pennies. They are lost and forgotten about much of the time.

5. jdpage ◴[12 Nov 25 21:51 UTC] No.45907285[source]▶
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.

[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.

[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.