The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

Are we pretending that nobody has ever tried phasing out smaller denomination currency, and that we don’t have a vast body of actual case studies to draw from? Why are we running thought experiments at all?

As others have pointed out, governments sometimes issue actual guidance on how it's supposed to work when they phase out currency. It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."

Americans like to pretend that history and the experience of the rest of the world doesn't exist and that things that large numbers of other countries have done successfully (and which even the US has done in the past, in this case, as the half-penny, after all, was phase out a long time ago) are impossible to do successfully.

Sales taxes as they are known in the US were largely introduced in the 20th century. The half-penny was phased out in the mid-19th century.

The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges that simply don't exist as problems that needed to be solved in other countries. These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized. Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

It makes no sense to spend more money to mint the actual money, then the money is worth OK. You might not like it, but something has to be done because to continue in a slow and methodical process 1) forgets that the government is the same entity that runs the DMV 2) people love to throw out criticisms of solutions that aren’t perfect not realizing that it’s still better than the status quo. To do nothing is costing money or in the case of Ukraine it’s costing lives. 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.

> 3) I bet you $100 You don’t like Trump.

I actually like Trump (or at least his presidency) a lot more than I think most Hacker News browsers do. I like Trump's presidency more than most of my co-workers and many of my friends do. My arguments in this thread are entirely my own, not the product of some political allegiance.

Can you explain further? Canada has sales tax and successfully phased out the penny.

> Pretending that these problems don't exist because they don't exist elsewhere is not helpful.

Pretend that’s everything in the US is globally unique to us also is not helpful. “No one else has sales tax like us” is likely not true but also not super relevant. Tax collecting agencies in 50 states and however many territories could issue guidance tomorrow for how to deal with this and it would have the force of law until/unless legislatures see fit to define different rules.

> for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Sure, but for every simple problem there is a small army of people online pretending it’s insurmountable.

No! The US is totally different from Canada. We cannot learn from anyone else’s success because we are a unique snowflake.

1) DMV is state-run, not federal govt. 2) Why can't we at least spend 5 minutes studying how it went in Canada, and learn that govt guidance was helpful to the transition, so do that too? 3) Sure. And even more because, even when he DOES pick up on a good idea (I support elimination of the penny), he does so in a haphazard / slipshod way that the end result is often worse than if nothing had been done.

The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".

It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.

Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.

> It's not always "just stop making them and see how the market deals with it."

On the other hand, we’ve been delaying this inevitable and necessary action for decades over hand-wringing about the implications of rounding up or down by a maximum of two damn cents per transactions _for decades_. If we did it “the right way” I’m sure it would take years and years and cost millions of dollars to “study the effects” of eliminating the penny. Just do it already. Even with the best plan in the world people are going to whine about rounding.

> The tax authorities cannot unilaterally change the law with "guidance".

The standard model for regulation is generally that the law empowers some agency to clear up any ambiguities.

Doubtful that any state has legislation on how to handle taxation if pennies are unavailable so a state tax body issuing reasonable guidance is a very believable outcome.

> It is explicitly written into statute in many cases, requiring legislative action across thousands of independent tax authorities. Complicating it more is that in some cases a change must satisfy constitutional requirements which are even harder to change.

Show me the legislation that says “taxes must be collected to the penny based on the posted price without rounding”.

What are these “thousands of independent tax authorities” anyway? Are you under the impression that every city and county needs to agree change the tax law? State law trumps local laws. Washington State doesn’t need Seattle to agree with laws specifying new rounding rules.

> Everything is easy if you pretend that you can change things by authoritarian fiat instead of abiding by existing statutory and constitutional restrictions. The courts would never allow it.

Have you not been around for the last 10 months?

But also the courts tend to be fairly reasonable. Faced with conflicting requirements they generally don’t say “fuck it you’re all going to jail” but direct legislatures to fix the issue. No way we end up in a situation where pennies are unavailable and the courts tell stores that they have to shut down or stop accepting cash entirely because there isn’t a legislatively specified way to round transactions to the nickel.

Unless I’m missing something, existing pennies are also not being removed from circulation, so none of this seems to be a major issue yet. Legislatures could do their jobs and clear this up quickly of they choose to.

Sales taxes in the US are truly and insanely decentralized.

The US has thousands of independent sales tax authorities with their own laws and regulations about how sales tax must be computed and displayed. These jurisdictions overlap, the sales tax you pay may be the aggregate of multiple different sales tax authorities between which there is no coordination.

Rounding to the nearest 5c or whatever creates a situation where in many locales it would be impossible to comply with sales tax and pricing laws because different tax authorities requiring mutually exclusive ways of making this change.

This creates an obvious need to change the law. This is not trivial because they are often written into statute or constrained by constitutional processes. It requires thousands of jurisdictions to all change their laws at the same time in the same way, which is effectively impossible. Even if it weren't the process would require several years. In many locales it requires a democratic vote -- what if the voters vote against it? Courts aren't going to let the government ignore these requirements because it would be inconvenient.

It really is a "herding cats" problem. There are many other things in the US that effectively can't be changed because there is no central authority to overcome coordination problems by fiat. Even at the level of all 50 States, resolving these kinds of coordination problems typically takes several decades.

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges

Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems.

In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage sales that resulted in fractions of a cent worth of sales tax to account for. Several states created sales tax tokens worth fractions of a cent and had to insist that it didn't technically count as money because states can't mint money legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_tax_token

Nobody went to jail. It was a minor nuisance for consumers and was quickly replaced with law changes to just have explicit rules for the edge case, which is the entire reason we have legislatures. If you don't want retailers to respond to this change in a certain way, have your legislatures say that.

>This is very much a case of the Mencken quote that for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Just stop already. The US is not special. The US regularly insists it cannot do the same things everyone else does and it is just wrong. We literally have textbooks full of examples from our own country. We've already phased out coinage before.

The UK went from it's absurd money system to reasonable and decimalized money within living memory! 15 February 1971. Sweden had a day where they switched from left hand roads to right hand roads! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H Most of Europe switched to Euros in living memory as well!

Stop insisting reasonable societal problems are too hard to solve, because that's the only actual reason they are hard to solve

>These problems can't be legislated away because the authority to do so is highly decentralized.

It isn't at all. It's in the Federal government, and it's in your local state government, and it's in your local-er governments, and that is just like a lot of other countries. A couple layers isn't "very decentralized".

It is only in the past 50 or so years that a singular political party has insisted that the same political party that did all sorts of speedy and useful lawmaking for a hundred years suddenly cannot adapt quickly. Meanwhile, 48 state governments continue to function mostly fine, with few problems adapting to local specific problems in a timely manner. If your state cannot adapt to this quickly and easily and without serious issues, consider electing different people.

> effectively impossible

Let’s assume you are correct. It is impossible to ever make this change for reasons X, Y, and Z.

What happens when stores just can’t get pennies anymore? Does the sky fall?