It costs 1.62 cents to make a penny. | Hacker News Reader

It costs 1.62 cents to make a penny.

us1.campaign-archive.com

12 pointsDanLivesHere9 comments

Statements like "..., it's cost slightly more to produce a penny than the one cent it is worth, leading to a loss of of about $20 million dollars, total, in 2009." are wrong minded. If every penny cost exactly one cent to make, we wouldn't be "breaking even" -- we'd still lose one cent per penny produced in production costs. The cost of producing money compared to its monetary value is irrelevant (though there is a problem if you can extract more than a cent of profit from melting them down).

It's a loss for the Mint, which sells coins at face value to the Fed. The Mint is taxpayer funded, so there really was a $20MM loss of taxpayer money in 2009.

According to Wikipedia, there were 2.354 billion pennies minted in 2009. At a cost of $0.0162/penny, that's $38MM of taxpayer money spent making pennies. Whether the mint gets part of its funding in the form of money it mints is irrelevant.

It's a cost to the taxpayer for a tactile service to the economy. Paving our roads was an enormous cost to the tax payers, but that doesn't bother anyone. Whats the difference between having roads to drive on, and having physical money to trade with?

If the government could change the way they pave roads to save money while still having the same quality of road, it would be good for them to do so.

If they could make pennies for cheaper, it would be good to do so.

I think you're blowing the importance of pennies out of proportion. Lower-quality pennies would not suddenly mean we don't have physical money to trade with — we could do away with pennies entirely and the only difference it would make to our physical money system is that cashiers could be a lot faster.

Not only that, but if this story is to be believed, we could have a lot more useful physical money if we stopped wasting millions on pennies.

Seems like an easy way to compromise... get rid of the penny and make a new zinc based coin with abraham lincoln on it that is a 20 cent piece

The real problem is the enormous inconvenience costs associated with using pennies. Next time you get one, leave it on the counter and you'll be money ahead. Never take them and never give them, maybe we can start a movement.

$180K in lobbying seems beatable.

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