There are enough in circulation that nobody will miss the lack of printing for decades
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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A: "Penny for your thoughts" B: "Lol, okay Gen Z"
Abolishing the USD cent comes way too late.
Was abolishing the half penny in 1857 a good idea? If so, then abolishing the quarter would be a good idea today. It has about as much buying power as the half penny did in 1857.
Paper dollars make no sense either.
Yeah, but honestly getting rid of coins is an admission that inflation is high relative to 40-50 years ago. When pretty much every government wants to keep that fact out of the public consciousness. Especially the current US government who wants to both claim we don't have inflation at all, and are the ones getting rid of the penny.
I've been saying we should drop the penny for almost 2 decades, but I still kind of look at getting rid of the penny as a sign of our current government's abysmal handling of inflation.
So I don't know the term for it, maybe it's just propaganda, but a quarter feels like it has value.
The penny however doesn't have that feeling. Vending machines often say "No Pennies" and toll booths say "No Pennies", even though the Penny exists everyone sorta already agreed the Penny wasn't worth the hassle.
I think you could probably convince people the same is true for the nickel. Although eliminating just the nickel is tricky since you'd keep the dime and quarter and that divides weirdly. So you should also remove the dime but that now really starts to feel like it had value.
But the quarter. That would be a hard sell. You're basically eliminating all coins at that point. Unless you plan on making the half dollar wayyy more popular.
When we got rid of the half penny it was worth more than what dimes are worth now. Quarters are the only useful coin. We should be rounding all transactions to the nearest quarter.
Logically I completely agree. I just don't think you could convince the US as a whole that's the way to go.
Should just have dimes.
$1.1 $1.2 $1.3
There's no reason to break our currency into thousandths. Hardly a reason to break it into hundredths.
Could keep quarters to keep hundredths
Transactions already need a nickel to do 5 cents. So requiring a quarter to do 5 cents isn't crazy.
Say you have to pay $1.05
Dollar and 3 dimes, quarter in change.
$1.15
Dollar and a quarter, dime in change.
But I think just dimes are needed
Just dimes would probably work logically, but it would feel too weird. If you're going just dimes, you probably just want to go all in and say no coins.
Now do daylight savings!!
Just get rid of half of it. I love "fall back." I hate "spring ahead."
Fall back every year! Yes! No spring forward!
No one can agree on which time to use so time change will never go away. It's really annoying. I don't give a shit which we use, just toss of the ducking time change. It's 1 hour, people gotta chill.
Fuck at this point does it even matter? The time change is bullshit on a baseline so long as it's done on the state level it shouldnt be too bad since eventually one of them will probably win out.
Exactly. Fuck DST.
I am a champion of the idea of keeping daylight saving over standard time but I am more and more starting to think that the time change is the best compromise we are going to get with the people who insist on getting to work at 8am in the light.
Let's look at NY city.
June 21th longest day, sunrise is at 5:24 am (Set 8:31 pm)
December 21th longest night, sunrise is at 6:42 am (Set 4:32 pm)
If you got rid of daylight savings time then the sun would rise at 4:24 am in June and set at 7:31 pm.
(Most people in NY probably want the extra hour of light at 7:31 pm instead of 4:24 am)
If you kept permanent daylight savings then the sun would rise at 7:42 am in December and set at 5:32 pm)
(Most people in NY probably want some light before 8 because it's going to be dark after dinner anyways)
So many people are awake before 8 am compared to 5 am
So many people enjoy the light at 7:30 pm in the summer
Switching really is the sweet spot for NY
Location is definitely important too in hating or liking DST
Ontonagon, Mi sun sets at 5:25 pm tonight (7:58 am rise)
Dexter, Me sun sets at 4:10 pm tonight (6:33 am rise)
Same time zone, both northern cities.
If we didn't get off DST Ontonagon wouldn't see the sunrise until almost 9 am today
People in Dexter might have preferred to stay on DST getting light between 7:33 am to 5:10 pm today
The farther west you live in a time zone the less you like DST generally. Farther east, the more you like it.
Ontonagon is so west it should really be in Central Time zone.
If that was the case then the sun would set at 4:25 pm tonight (6:58 am rise) (basically Dexter ME times)
At that point they might want to stay on DST and it would make it exactly what it was today, sunset at 5:25 pm tonight (7:58 am rise)
I just think humans don’t work well with such a sudden change even just 1 hr. Maybe there’s a way we could add/remove a minute every day over two months or something lol
Programmers would be on suicide watch if we did that
As I was typing it I was trying to figure out how it would work on electronic devices and my head exploded. Let alone just your everyday clock.
They tried permanent DST in the '70s for a few years. People hated it so much we went back to switching the clocks.
That final penny struck is going to sell for a shit ton of money.
I'll buy it for two pennies. That's 100% profit for the seller.
Note that the legal framework for phasing out the coin is entirely absent. This was an illegal act as well because only Congress determines what money exists and will be used according to the Constitution.
It still exists and can still be used. They're just not making more of them.
More to the point, it isn't sensible.
A penny lasts decades as a tangible item of currency. I have pennies in my change purse right now that were struck in the 1960's.
The value isn't in how much it costs to make it but in how long it lasts as usable token of trade.
How long it lasts as a usable token of trade
So it's still worthless. Genuinely, what can a penny purchase? A nickel? A dime? None of these coins can buy something individually, and a large chunk of the population doesn't carry them because the utility they gain for having exact change is less than the coins are worth
To be clear, I understand the coins vs. bills argument, but I'm personally in favor of cutting all coins up to the quarter. Or cutting all coins except dimes and half dollars, but dimes are annoying coins
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Yeah, but like, is it a valuable token of trade? It's 1c, yes that's money, its a whole percent of a dollar, but it's illegal in most of the country to pay someone less than 12.5 of them per minute of labor, an unlivably low wage. The $15/hr wage is increasingly normal for low skilled labor and is a quarter a minute. A quarter is great as you don't need to fill your pocket with it to buy something from a vending machine. Ok that's not the most honest comparison as vending machines haven't taken pennies in at least a decade. It's a denomination sufficiently small to cause a lot of people to just not bother with them, they just aren't worth the time to use them or keep track of them.
It just don't make no cents.
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Good, while we're at it we should redecimalize. A coin that can't pay for a significant portion of something is worthless. People used to buy snacks with coins, and like, thats where they thrive. Coins are more expensive than bills but they can change hands a lot more times. A dime for a soda or a cheap snack, maybe a nickel if it's a good deal on a bag of chips is about right.
Like, this isn't even a monetary policy failure, it's just something that should happen every century or two in an inflationary economy with a 5% target.
The rule should be "if you pay with it at a restaurant it should be a coin" because it represents a daily use rather than weekly or monthly and much higher levels of wear and tear.
If not for credit cards we'd probably need $10 coins.
Zimbabwe has entered the chat
Those $100,000,000,000,000 bills are fire!
i wouldn’t be so sure about this. i still have plenty of pennies and plenty of stamps to put on those pennies.
Fuck pennies. Even back in the 90s, it was annoying to receive.
When Trumpflation kicks in they'll need to stop minting more denominations too.
Funny thing.
A few days ago I looked through my pockets and found a 1935 penny. Copper pennies were collected and melted down in WW2; the pennies from that era were steel.
It wasn't worth a lot but it was an interesting find. Back in the day, you could buy a cigarette or a newspaper with that penny. I wondered how far it had traveled, and what they'd used it for.
1943 was the one year they made the zinc plated steel pennies. They've been various ratios of copper before and after (from 88% to 97%) until 1982, when they turned to 97.5% zinc with a 2.5% copper plating.
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I'll believe it when I stop seeing pennies.
Just close your eyes.
They're still there, rotating in my mind.
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