The Trump administration says making cents doesn’t make sense anymore.
The U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks and plans to stop producing the coin when those run out, a Treasury Department official confirmed Thursday. This move comes as the cost of making pennies has increased markedly, by upward of 20% in 2024, according to the Treasury.
By stopping the penny’s production, the Treasury expects an immediate annual savings of $56 million in reduced material costs, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the news.
In February, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to cease production of the 1-cent coin.
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There are about 114 billion pennies currently in circulation in the United States — that’s $1.14 billion — but they are greatly underutilized, the Treasury says. The penny was one of the first coins made by the U.S. Mint after its establishment in 1792.
The nation’s treasury secretary has the authority to mint and issue coins “in amounts the secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.”
Advocates for ditching the penny cite its high production cost — almost 4 cents per penny now, according to the U.S. Mint — and limited utility. Fans of the penny cite its usefulness in charity drives and relative bargain in production costs compared with the nickel, which costs almost 14 cents to mint.
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Jay Zagorsky, professor of markets, public policy, and law at Boston University, said that while he supports the move to end penny production, Congress must include language in any proposed legislation to require rounding up in pricing, which will eliminate the demand for pennies.
Zagorsky, who recently published a book called “The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society,” said otherwise simply ditching the penny will only increase demand for nickels, which are even more expensive, at 14 cents to produce.
“If we suddenly have to produce a lot of nickels — and we lose more money on producing every nickel — eliminating the penny doesn’t make any sense.”
See here for the background, and here for my entire obsession with these dumb coins. Somehow, in all that discussion, I had either not realized or forgotten how much more expensive nickels were to mint, which makes me wonder if there will be a push to eliminate them as well. One thing I do recall is that because of sales taxes, which will take your nice divisible-by-five price and make it something that requires pennies to transact, the fear was that all final sales prices would round up as needed and thus make everything a teeny bit more expensive, which naturally would be felt the most by the poorest folks. That still seems to be inevitable, it just seems less likely that there will be any public fretting about it. Post-COVID, I seldom transact in cash anymore, but I’ll be on the lookout now for those rare times that I do for any price changes to make the loss of the penny less evident. We’ll see how long that takes.
Anything to cause more pain and suffering. Never do anything to help people, never do anything for the comm9n good. Just a bunch of thieves and grifters and liars. I am seriously having a difficult time coming up with anything these people do for us, you know, the citizens that vote for them.
Texas is a joke.