Get rid of the penny?

[Lynda/WA]

A Congressman has proposed getting rid of the penny. What do you think?

[jbaxter]

and have the price of everything rolled up tho the nearest nickel - i'll vote to keep the penny.

[Mickey]

Lynda, what are the pros of doing this according to this Congressman?

Regardless (unless the pros were unbelievably awesome), I don't see it happening. Americans are WAY too attached to their money. In England they change the currency frequently to avoid counterfeiting. Their notes (bills) are all different sizes (so the blind and elderly don't struggle to differentiate between them) and they have one- and two-pound coins as well as a 2 p coin (a two-penny coin) and they all work very well and the people don't resist much to the changing and adding and doing away with currency. But our government has tried to introduce the dollar coin a few times and the two dollar bill as well, but people just don't want anything to do with it--we didn't take to the 50 cent piece either. They even ADVERTISE new coins on t.v. to no avail. Not sure why there's such a resistance.

Get rid of the penny? I don't see it happening. Even if the reasoning is great, Americans wouldn't like it, imo.

[MaryL]

I don't see it happening, either. I heard that one of the problems was that so many people save their pennies (piggy banks, etc). The government spends a lot of money to mint new pennies every year because so many of them are out of circulation. We just counted up the money in our ds' piggy bank...He had $53 in coins...mostly pennies!

[TXmom]

Our city is in the process of enacting a 1/2 cent sales tax to counter the effects of the Robin Hood plan. How could we do something like that if there was no penny? Have sales taxes in incredments of 5 cents? Do you know what Congressman it was?

[RCT]

leave it alone...if everything has to be rounded up to the nearest 5 cents...forget it...I like my money the way it is now...LOL....and how would I buy stamps? LOL...the way they are always going up a penny....yike going up 5 cents all the time would be awful...LOL...I say to let us keep our pennies...LOL...:lol: JMHO

[Lynda/WA]

I didn't catch the name of the congressman. MaryL is correct. His reasoning is that people horde them until they have thousand. Then turn them in. One of those companies that has machines where you put your change in cited the stats of how much of turned in money was pennies. Can't remember the actual figure but it was over 50%. The point made was that people take them home. Stick them in a jar and don't use them to pay. Another point made was that so many stores have penny jars. The point being that people consider a penny useless. Add into that the cost of minting something that is going to sit in a jar on your dresser.

The talk show host pointed out that it may actually SAVE us money as consumers. So many items cost #.99. Say an item costed 4.99. Would the store just round it up to 5.00? The reason it's less then 5.00 right now is so you perceive it as cheaper. Sort of a psycological trick. More than likely they would just go 4.95. Either that or leave it at 4.99 and just round the total after tax.

The way it sounded they want to leave pennies as a factor in figuring like they use parts of a penny for computation(ie 7.7 tax in WA). Then round the final figure.