It's Time to Abolish Dimes

Formerly there were "dime stores" and now there are "dollar stores". So the currency has been diluted ~~10x over a period of [something less than] a century. So every unit is now 0.1 of what it was when the decisions were made that still govern the size, weight, and quantity of production of both coins and paper currency. Today's penny is what used to be a "mill", one-tenth of a cent, a unit still used locally within living memory but issued at the state level rather than by the U. S. Mint. Half-cents were scrapped as long ago as 1857; they would be today's nickel (or more). The Canadians, Australians, Brits, and Europeans have it right: useful coins today would be 10, 20, 50 cents, 1 dollar, and 2 dollars. (I suppose we can grant the quarter legacy status, even though it originated from a crown-size coin that was so thin that it could be bent and broken in half, then in half again.)

The half cent in the United State was done away with in 1857. Though calculating inflation from that year to now is somewhat shaky, it's roughly equal to $0.175 now and the penny, which then became the smallest unit of currency, was worth about $0.35. Getting rid of everything smaller than a quarter would still give us more fidelity than we had in 1857 when the one cent penny became our smallest coin.

A dime today is roughly the equivalent of half-a-cent around 1970.

But the next coin up is 25 cents. That's a jump too far, just right now. Keep the dime for the next 5-10 years and then kill it off.

The 1-cent and the 5 cent coins are useless and irrelevant. They must be abolished.

No. Never.