Mad Money Machine

Dime is the New Penny?

The CBS show 60 Minutes did a segment about the penny. You can watch Should We Make Cents?  or read the transcript. Bottom line is this: the gobmint makes $80 million worth of pennies every year. But the problem is that it costs the gobmint $134 million to make them. Not bad if you’re a zinc provider. Bad if you are a taxpayer. Bad for inflation. And guess what, that cost probably ain’t going to go down. Same thing with the nickel. They make $65 million worth of nickels every year. But it costs $124 million to make them.  Stop the insanity! Say goodbye to the penny and nickel. How?

Dear friends, it is time to get rid of a decimal place. I know, I know, you love your precious two decimal places. $14.95. $19.99. Or even $1.00. Well I have a proposal that will save all us taxpayers a lot of money in zinc costs: Get rid of a decimal place! This actually works out in favor of the consumer because now prices would be $14.9 and $19.9 on the same items. No need to round up! Get rid of nickels and pennies. The only use for a nickel would be if you had two of them. Similarly for a penny, you could only buy something if you had ten of them. Eventually the lowest useful coin becomes the dime. And the gobmint could even fashion new dimes with Jefferson and Lincoln on them as an homage to our lost coin friends.

Our pockets would be lighter, our gobmint would save $113 million each and every year by not having to make these coins. That works out to be $1.3 billion after ten years  and probably much more owing to the rising cost of zinc and copper (or said more properly, the lowering value of the dollar). Just think what we could do with $1.3 billion… reduce taxes!