Interesting article on the penny
 

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com....aspx?GT1=8376

There is a table at the bottom that shows how much it actually costs to produce money. I think it is interesting that it costs more to make a penny and nickle then they are worth.

That and it actually costs less to make $100 then a $50

Saw this. My g/f and i speculated that this is just another ploy for the government to round everything up and make more tax $$$.

The government is not a monolithic whole

Hm... wonder why the $100 costs much less than $50, $20, and $10.

I'd be in favor of killing off the penny, personally. Just round everything to fives.

SI

Sounds fishy. If something cost $1.01, the powers that be would round up to $1.05. All those 4 cent charges add up. Does sound like extra tax revenue could be generated. Or...

This is, in no small part, one reason why a whole lot of perfectly sensible things don't get done.

How much is the government paying you to say that?

A pretty penny.

:D

Well playeyd sire

Because it hasn't got it's redesign yet with the increased security features.

What happened to the paperless office? Does getting rid of the penny mean we have to round everything to the nearest five cents? Haven't you people seen Office Space?

Fixed.

Don't know why it's taking so long...I've been doing this in Monopoly for years.


It would be a normal rounding situation. $1.01 and .02 would be $1.00.

I wonder if it's because the $100 is produced in greater quantities? Not even sure if that's true, but would at least suggest some kind of economies of scale factor at work here.

Really think they would round down????????????
I don't think it would be priced at cents, but at 5 cent intervals.

Really think they would round down????????????

While stores might do that, indeed the inflationary aspect of things is a good reason to keep the peeny I feel, sales tax would prevent there from being round figures in the end and so there would still be rounding.

How does rounding to the nearest nickel make any sense?

Considering that it costs more than five cents to make a nickel, why not do away with that at the same time? Then round to the nearest dime.

Wouldn't it possibly make more sense to either move away from proper currency (never would happen) or to devalue the dollar? And I realize that the dollar will never be devalued because the average American is much too stupid to realize that even though they would technically make less, they would still make the same amount (with all due respect to infaltion.)

Niiiice.

I would think it's the opposite - the dollar won't be devalued not because of the average american, but because of the super rich (i.e. those who run the guv'ment/country), whose large amounts of assets would be devalued. The average american, on the other hand, who probably has a negative net worth, could stand to gain from a devalued dollar.

*now waiting to be schooled by q/s or some other person who actually knows what they're talking about*

I love how in the independent run establishments in NYC, everyone's just taken it upon themselves to eliminate the penny anyway. Everything is rounded down. My kind of people.

I think it's the other way around, actually. In a regular situation, any time someone drops a $100 bill in front of you in a retail situation or what have you, it's out of the ordinary and most stores have protocols set up to deal with large bills, making it a lot harder to pass counterfeit bills around. Even if you succeed at first, you won't succeed for long because people will remember you. On the other hand, if you drop a lot of counterfeit $20s about an area, nothing about your transaction will be worth remembering unless there's something noticeably wrong with the tender itself.

That, at least, is why IMO they got to the $20s and the $10s first.

What inflationary aspect? The most you'd have inflation on anything over $1 is 5% and that's barely above the yearly average (well, technically it would be even less than 5% as the most would be 1.01 to 1.05 which would be 3.96%). And that's just as everyone rounds up from 1.01 to 1.05 or 1.03 to 1.05, etc. Never mind that if you're rounding from, say, 101.47 to 101.50.

SI

Sure, we could move up to the dime. That would work as well. I just suggested nickel as it was the next one up the scale.

It's not as if 1/100th of a dollar is some sacred amount anyways. It's just where we choose to round. Superman and Office Space jokes aside, this happens every day. At a gas station, we round from 9/10ths of 1 cent for some antiquated reason that I don't even know, and it doesn't cause the earth to stop revolving around the sun.

SI

I wish they'd come up with a coin for a value to be 1/10th of a penny. I'd love to give a gas station owner 2,999 of them when gas is priced at 2.999.

I'm all for getting rid of the penny. However, let's say I wasn't surprised when I read in an article that the congressman who is sponsoring the bill to dump the penny is located in the state that produces the most copper of any state (and coincidentally, nickels are primarily made of copper).

I pay all my daily expenses with a credit card and all my monthly expenses online electonically. How does this effect me? Maybe we should just punish those people clogging up the system with their paper and coins. :)


BTW- All banking transactions that figure in percentages round down in favor of the banks. If your account has $39.9999 in it at the end of your statement period you will only be able to caryyover $39.99 to the next period.

Sorry, I do not carry cash anymore.