My two cent or making it hail on the next Rocky and Bullwinkle

Look around your home, gather up all of the coins you have there, count them up. How much money do you have and what percentage of coins not the amount are pennies. When was the last time you actually spent a penny. How many pennies do you return to the economy or spend as currency compared to the number of other coinage you spend and receive. If you are like most people once you get that penny it is forever removed from the economy and serves no purpose at all. Look in fountains, rivers, streets and land fills and you will find pennies tossed away like so much rubbish. Turn to any DIY site and you will find pennies being used for flooring, lamp shades and various other surfacing material but not for the intended purpose for which they exist, which is to be used in the exchange of goods and services. No one knows exactly how many pennies actually are out in the world but the estimate is two hundred billion. TWO HUNDRED BILLION. The percentage of them used in actual commerce is so low that the US mint has to make millions of pennies to replace the ones that fall out of circulation every year. Millions of new pennies every year. The cost of production for a penny is estimated to be over twice what it is worth, while others will state that it is slightly less than twice. Either way it costs more to make them than they are worth. The division of our currency will always be down to the single cent, and in many cases percentages of a cent. However we don’t have half pennies any longer and as far as I have been able to determine the half penny is the smallest value coin made by our minting. You know why you don’t see half pennies, because we stopped making them. They outlived there function which the penny is well beyond a reasonable lifespan and should be put to rest. The penny is only around in day to day commerce out of nostalgia and serves no purpose. Don’t even say taxes. Our system of collecting taxes from the consumer and seller is misused. I am not saying that we should not pay taxes. We should they serve a valuable function to pay for infrastructure which makes living in a nation this vast workable. However tacking the tax on at the pay out point complicates things and is ultimately misleading leaning toward fraud. The taxes should be in the price that the consumer sees when making the purchase and any accounting to sort our revenue from taxes collected need to be done by the seller after the transaction. The accounting is done this way regardless if you price something with or without the tax in the price. I have work in businesses that have done this both ways. Prices including the taxes and with out the taxes included. Transactions moved much more speedily when the taxes were included. Less change had to be made and fewer errors occurred with taxes in the price than when compared to when taxes were not included in the price. The penny should be eliminated from day to day transactions but kept for bank transactions only. Most people do not even use cash at all but eliminating is not a viable option at this time either. There are studies by economist in the US that say the poor loose in the elimination of the penny however very little evidence in countries where the penny has been eliminate exist to support that claim. The rounding that is done works in the 1 and 2 cent transactions go down to 0 and 3 and 4 cent transactions go up to the 5 and the same for 6 and 7 down to 5 and 8 and 9 up to 0. Certainly there will be businesses who will price everything to be rounded up. However in a free market economy with competition in pricing those businesses will begin to see their customers moving to businesses which price fairly and do not attempt to gouge or bilk the customer. Any use of money serves the purpose to encourage commerce and spending which drive the economy. However it should also be governed in such a way that is economical and sound. Throwing away millions of dollars to produce a coins which are not used and on bills which have no viable life span is wasting money collected in taxes that could be better spent in other ways. Additional waste accumulated in the millions of dollars is the printing of one and five dollar bills. These bills have the least longevity in the economy and each one printed has to be replaced as unusable in less than 5 years. Coins however will remain usable in the economy for 30 years or longer. Replacing all one dollar and five dollar bills will save so much money that the printing of all currency may actually operate at even rates, that the money produced with worth what was spent to produce it. Of all the government offices which exist, this one should not operate at a loss or have as little loss as possible. To say that the use of one dollar and five dollar coins will not work is just a load of propaganda against change. Every other nation in the world with a workable coinage system use coins worth 1, 2 and 5 increments of their currency without difficulty. We say we are the greatest nation on earth yet we can’t figure out how to use coins? Come on it isn’t exactly tough stuff here. It even further speeds transactions and encourages small amount purchases. Having lived in Europe while serving in military I used coins for most of my purchases and paper money for easily less than a third of the transactions I made off the base. The use of coins just worked more easily. The US has attempted to adopt the dollar coins in less than enthusiastic ways in my life time. The Susan B Anthony dollar was too similar in size, weight and visual to the quarter it quickly fell out of favor and disuse. Other dollar coins were not distributed widely enough and even when asking for them in change often times. Businesses did not have any. Only the Post Office regularly had them available. We should be doing things that save us time and money rather than just sticking to the ways things have been done because that is the way that they are done. If things never changed you would still need an ox and a few chickens to buy stuff. Then there is the identity theft issue. How many times a day do you pull out a banking card to make a purchase for something that is under ten dollars, in a month. If you could cut those monthly transactions in half you would be cutting the risk of theft of your card info in half and also reducing the cost your bank spends on managing your accounts. If every person in the US cut their electronic transactions in half the time and money saved by every business would be substantial but they would still be making money. How many times have you had a bill that wouldn’t go into a vending machine because it wasn’t crisp, that problem is gone if you have a coin that works. Or how many times have you not even had a one dollar bill and only a 5 and not one has enough single or change. That isn’t a problem with a coin. Sure the stripper industry would take a hit because throwing dollar coins is more like making it hail than making it rain. That’s all for now, other stuff tomorrow most likely Happy Birthday if it is your birthday and a very merry un birthday if it is not your birthday Thank you for reading, please subscribe, Have a great day and play nice in the neighborhood. Ciao, Gamer Tag: invisible don PO Box 4425 Roanoke VA 24015