Trump says he has directed Treasury to stop minting new pennies | Hacker News Reader

Trump says he has directed Treasury to stop minting new pennies

apnews.com

Also commented in a duplicate thread: No fan of DT, but this one does make sense (CAN chucked pennies years ago).

If I read the article cited below correctly, penny minting has a smell of lobbying in a safe quiet corner:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennie...

I can't read the article you linked so I'm not sure if it mentions this, but IIRC one of the reasons for ditching the penny in Canada was that it cost more than a penny of copper to make a penny out of copper.

Now when we buy something we get told a rounded-off price (e.g. $3.72 is told to us as $3.70) but if we pay digitally (i.e. by card) then we get charged the exact amount.

Exactly. When this first came down, many Canadians (including me, true confessions) had their petty quibbles at the till about rounding (ok the rounding was sometimes wonky, hence the petty quibbles). Most of us have got over it.

> but IIRC one of the reasons for ditching the penny in Canada was that it cost more than a penny of copper to make a penny out of copper.

That's true for all coins, otherwise it would be an infinite money hack

Isn't that backwards? If a penny contains more than a penny's worth of copper you can make "infinite" money by exchanging some money for pennies, smelting them down into copper, selling the copper for more money than you exchanged in the first place, and repeating the process until you're as rich as Bezos.

The overhead of obtaining a large amount of pennies and smelting them likely makes the whole operation unprofitable, besides being illegal for defacing currency.

> That's true for all coins, otherwise it would be an infinite money hack

The government can print money if it wants to; it's just a bad idea.

This is not correct. Most US coins (other than the cent and the 5 cent nickel) cost much less to make compared to their face value. For example, it costs just a bit less than 6 cents to make a dime, and just shy of 15 cents to make a quarter [0]. The "profit" that the government makes via minting coins and printing currency is known as seigniorage [1], and is reflected in the government's budget as revenue.

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5136331-how-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

Making fewer pennies means needing more nickels. Which have an even larger loss per unit: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/business/cost-to-make-penny-n...

Why would we need more nickels? Transactions will end up being rounded to the nearest nickel, which will end up being a dime on one side or a nickel on the other as the smallest necessary coin. Seems like it all evens out.

Both will be used more, the issue with the nickel is that it costs around 14¢ to make one.

I'd have to see a mathematical proof as to why nickels or dimes would be used more, I don't actually think that's the case.

The only logical argument I can imagine is that people are using stacks of 5 pennies now routinely instead of nickels. But personally I never see that happening.

All of the "more nickels" noise is being paid for by the penny copper supplier.

The penny is mostly zinc. It's only 2.5% copper.

Interestingly, the nickel is 75% copper -- so copper suppliers would strongly prefer to ditch the penny if it meant making more nickels.

Keep going! We only need the quarter.

We need to stop minting pennies and nickels. We could stop inflation by restoring the gold standard but nobody seems to mind inflation that much.

Getting rid of pennies/nickels sure, but where does the gold standard come in?

You want to tie the economy to a material that doesn't capture economic growth and which also has its remaining stores in areas of the world not owned by your nation?

If Google wasn't lying to me with its response, the current USA gdp is over $20 trillion, and the US owns around $200 billion in gold.

Wouldn't tying gold to the current economy either devalue the dollar or inflate the current value of gold before locking the country into a state of economic stagnation?

Whether or not it’s a good idea doesn’t mean that it’s good to bypass the legislature.

These initiatives are more about trying to assert absolute authority in people’s minds more than anything else.

By choosing something that people might agree with he is subtly getting the public to allow him to have unchecked authority in other areas.

someone in his camp is smart/devious/slick enough to advise him to test his autocracy by skipping the rules on things that are already obvious before moving on to skip the rules on more dubious and unpalatable endeavors

I would liken it to testing the electric fences in different sectors like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park, starting with the sections that are hidden from cameras by bushes, before knocking down the ones out in the open.

Don’t forget that upcoming national crisis that will require us to forgo having any rule of law.

I don't think it's "testing autocracy"; it's just getting a lot of things done as fast as possible. Trump made a lot of campaign promises.

Contrast it with Labour over here in the UK, who've "only" been in power 6 months, and the difference is incredible.

It's Stephen Miller's take on a strategy out of Steve Bannon's playbook - Flood The Zone.

I'm not saying it's legal, but I don't think the motivation is testing limits.

That's exactly what the strategy is meant for. It's meant to overwhelm.

Legislature could have done this, the issue hasn't crept up on us. Unforunately, the system is broken (it can't identify and get support for clear wins).

I agree that government is all about setting, following and self-modifying rules, but that takes cooperation.

The legislature hasn't attempted since John McCain, but he also wanted to replace 1 dollar bills with coins. Perhaps trying to make too many changes at once.

The discussion only resurfaced in 2023 when the US mint released a report about the high cost to produce pennies. No legislative efforts had been introduced since that report.

From the NYT:

While consulting Title 31 of the U.S. Code (to see how much annual penny minting was required by law), I came upon a statute outlining general instructions for the apportionment of American coins. “The Secretary of the Treasury shall,” Section 5111 reads, “mint and issue” denominations of coins “in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.” I reread the sentence several times. Groping for a light switch in a bolted room, had my fingers brushed over the knob of an unlocked door? Amounts the Secretary decides are necessary. What if the secretary decided the amount of pennies necessary was zero?

I contacted Christine Desan, a Harvard law professor who specializes in the constitutional law of money. I asked what she made of Section 5111. “The way it reads to me as a lawyer,” Desan said, is that “there’s nothing in here that indicates the secretary has to issue them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/briefing/the-penny-us-cur...

A lot of new orders make sense, just not the important ones.

Which ones make sense?

Honestly just googled and couldn't find one :)

Something in the line of removing two separate buttons to flush a toilet, different words of course just to illustrate the impact (negligent).

But I also found one important order that does make sense: stop UNRWA funding. Don't remember any other though that would make sense.

Why does removing two seperate buttons to flush a toilet make sense to you? I grew up in Canada which always had one before moving to England in the early 2000s where I first encountered two buttons and thought it was weird but 25 years later it makes a lot more sense to have different levels of water usage available.

Likewise, I absolutely do not support Trump and his administration, but among him, Musk, and even RFK Jr, there are policy choices that I do support; they just tend to get drowned out by the cacophony of terrible choices.

Honestly, when looking back at the accomplishments of any administration, you'll likely find more things you agree with than disagree with. Presidents get a lot of ideas passing across their desks, generally posed by their subordinates. It's usually one big smear that overshadows it all (e.g. starting a never-ending war in the Middle East, implementing an extra-judiciary drone assassination program, ravaging the scientific institutions that help to make this country a hub of innovation, etc)

I guess we're lucky if we only get one smear?

Not very uplifting but maybe realistic?

Okay, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Though it's not particularly original; I think about half the eurozone has stopped production of 1 and 2 cent coins, at this point, and in some cases demonetised them. Presumably to the disappointment of washing machine repair providers everywhere; their size made them perfect for jamming in the pump in a particularly awkward to extract manner.

Regardless of what you think about the content of the order, it’s unconstitutional, so he’s still going about it the wrong way.

Ah, missed that aspect. Of course…

Might be time to stop extending him the benefit of the doubt.

Obama wanted to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Was that unconstitutional as well? I don't remember reading any articles about it being that.

As to the constitutionality of Trumps order, it certainly isn't as definitively unconstitutional as you seem to think it is.

https://www.theglobaltreasurer.com/2025/02/10/trump-orders-t...

Robert K. Triest, an economics professor at Northeastern University, noted that while a full discontinuation would require legislative approval, the Treasury Secretary might have some discretion to halt production.

“The process of discontinuing the penny in the U.S. is a little unclear. It would likely require an act of Congress, but the Secretary of the Treasury might be able to simply stop the minting of new pennies,” Triest explained.

> Obama wanted to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Was that unconstitutional as well? I don't remember reading any articles about it being that.

That seems to be due to you miss remembering the particulars of the issue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/harriet-tubman-20-bi...

"The Treasury Department announced in 2016 that Tubman would replace Jackson"

So in one instance, we have cancelling of minting new pennies, ototh we have the changing of a picture.

I do think there might be viable authority to cancel the minting of the penny in the same way that there might have been viable authority for Biden to mint a coin and cancel debt. Seems to be similar rules at play there.

Congress has made rules regarding currency under which changing the portrait to show Harriet Tubman doesn't require specific Congressional approval. (For example, the person must be deceased.) Historically and constitutionally choosing or ending entire denominations has been up to Congress.

No, it wasn’t, because the Second Legal Tender Act of 1862 as well as 12 USC 418 explicitly grants the Secretary of the Treasury the authority to approve new designs for currency. All of this information is easily googleable if you’d like to educate yourself.

Responding to your edit: It is absolutely and objectively unconstitutional according to the letter of the constitution, no matter what Random Economics Professor might say. Whether anyone will care is a different discussion entirely.

>(a) The Secretary of the Treasury—(1) shall mint and issue coins described in section 5112 of this title in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States;

The secretary decides the amount necessary is 0.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5111

Seems reasonable. What’s the downside other than someone losing a zinc contract?

Well for one all prices along sales tax have to be rounded up or down to increments of $0.05 which is the profit margin for many things produced in high volume.

Most transactions aren’t cash

This doesn't remove them from circulation. If it did, though, card transactions, versus cash, could still use smaller increments.

Rounding is generally done only for cash transactions (“cash rounding”). For all other payment types, the unrounded price is used.

I wrote code for this a long time ago when cash was still a major form of payment in a country that got rid of sub 0.05 coins. There were various rules to try to ensure neither the seller or buyer always benefited.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

The rounding up will be done by the merchant when he updstes the prices, and the buyer will always lose.

No code will save you here.

How? If you price something at $1.03 so that it rounds up to $1.05, someone who buys two will get it rounded down to $2.05

No the price will become 1.05 and when customer buys 2 it will be 2.10 not 2.05

I prefer if shops do that (or actually the more common €2 instead of the deceptive €1.99 or 1.95), but most shops don't round their prices.

I recall some major US chain (TJ Maxx? JC Penney? Target? Something?) that decided to start pitching some kind of 'honest pricing' scheme, where all their stuff was just rounded up, so instead of $24.99 it would be priced at $25 flat.

A noble goal, but it apparently backfired on them spectacularly because of the same reason why retailers did that in the first place.

It was JC Penney, however they went beyond merely rounding prices. They ditched sales and coupons, which are unfortunately very popular, and that is often cited as the reason the "fair and square" plan failed.

Did they replace the sales and coupons with simply lower prices across the board? Because that would make it more attractive to buy there. If not, it's a price increase.

Yes, but the lower prices across the board were close to the average selling price before, not the best price you used to be able to get using a coupon for an item on sale. Therefore deal hunters no longer wanted to shop there. The price-insensitive folks still did, but they were the ones who used to pay full price and subsidize the deal hunters, and now they were getting a lower price than before. Thus it was a money losing strategy for the company.

If you were already pricing in mils to be competitive, your customers will not accept an increase of 5c "because the country got rid of the penny."

It's basically impossible that your customer was paying you in cash at that point anyways.

> No the price will become 1.05 and when customer buys 2 it will be 2.10 not 2.05

That's quite literaly against the "various rules to try to ensure neither the seller or buyer always benefited" that the previous commenter was talking about writing software to handle.

No country that has cash rounding rules would allow 2*1.03 to be charged $2.10.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

(Unless you mean: the price of a single item is changed to $1.05, in which case sure; that's the business's perogative to raise prices but it's not taking advantage of the rounding system)

Since sales taxes are added at the time of purchase in North America, none of that ends up mattering because the randomness of someone's shopping cart plus the percentage of sales tax makes it impossible to price your inventory in such a way as to consistently benefit the retailer.

Worth mentioning that despite not having a one-cent denomination, products are still priced in cents - e.g. in Canada you still price something at $2.79 even though we have no pennies. It's only at the payment step, when cash is being used, that anything is rounded off.

I mean, retailers could certainly increase their shelf prices, but if they were going to do that they would do so anyway, and the $X.99 pricing pattern exists for a reason so there's not really anywhere to increase those prices by some small amount that wouldn't put people off anywa.

I think GP is saying that, when paying with cash, because there is no option for sub-5c prices, the only option is to round to the nearest 5c.

If price is $1.03 then for cash customers, the price has to become $1.05. If paying debit or credit card then the price can stay $1.03 because there is no cost for computing pennies.

The optics of the change is that it does cost more for the consumer if paying cash and if you have a society that wants to push more people to digital transactions then this is how you start to do it along with the optics and ramifications that go with it.

The general practice is to round up or down to the nearest unit when paying cash. That means if you only have nickels, you either round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. It should average out. Absolutely no one is getting rich off of this.

The entire world is already moving to digital currencies and even if you do everything with cash, rounding up and down to the nearest nickel - per total transaction is not going to make a dent in anyone’s budget - even the poorest people.

If you make 4 cash transactions a day and your total transactions are always rounded up, you’re going to be out of $3.60 a month and that’s the worse case.

I come from a country that has rounding. The unrounded price always shown on the shelf, and is what you pay unless it's cash.

If you do pay cash, it's not the item's price that's rounded, it's the total. That's important because the amount being rounded is essentially random, so the shop can't chose a price that would be rounded in one direction. In a $10 purchase using 0.05 rounding the maximum difference amounts to 0.4%, but is usually 0.2% or less. It's so small it could be used as an advertising gimmick, and consequently some retailers chose to always round down. The remainder went with rounding to the nearest with the lowest value winning in a tie.

I do not remember a single one always rounding up. That would be a customer relations disaster.

We're talking about the US. We'll just round everything up because it's simpler and blame it on communists or the wokes or something.

If you're rounding to 0.05, you don't even need to break ties - any price ending in an integer number of cents can be rounded fairly to the nearest 0.05, e.g.

  1.00       -> already round
  1.01, 1.02 -> round down to 1.00
  1.03, 1.04 -> round up to 1.05
  1.05       -> already round
  1.06, 1.07 -> round down to 1.05
  1.08, 1.09 -> round up to 1.10
  1.10       -> already round

Take a penny, leave a penny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_a_penny%2C_leave_a_penny

But we didn’t ban the penny, just stop making them for a while because plenty in circulation.

If I buy 10,000 $0.01 screws, they aren’t all the sudden going to charge $0.05 cents for a screw…

Reprogramming of cash registers.

Canadian here: we don't reprogram cash registers. They tell the exact amount and then we're charged either the exact amount (via card) or a rounded-off amount (if paying cash).

FWIW, 86% of "total payment volume" in Canada was digital, and 53% of transactions were contactless. If that's not the case in the US, it may be more of an adjustment.

Yea american POS systems will have to get the rounding off added because ultimately cashiers will get grilled if their registers are off at the end of day.

Registers are always off at the end of the day everywhere I've worked retail.

I even worked as a bank teller and it wasn't uncommon for drawers to be out small amounts.

From what I recall when I worked retail, nobody cared until the difference was something like 2% or so. Then someone might care, or might not.

It was always easy to keep a perfect running balance when the cashier can make change accurately and when there was a penny/nickel jar because customers might not have had exact change. It's only the normalization of sloppiness, or sometimes theft, of cashiers that causes shrinkage in reconciliation. It doesn't just magically happen and isn't a foregone conclusion.

It doesn't just magically happen, but it basically is a foregone conclusion. Nobody cares about a register that is off by 57 cents at the end of the day. You're going to waste WAY more money trying to hire "smart" cashiers at $5-$10 over the prevailing wage than you would just putting up with people who occasionally make errors in counting change.

Last time I worked retail was 1996-1997 and we meticulously had to count the register. If it was off then it was on us. This was pre touch screens and auto calculating registers. The same still applies in the latest modern world. You are off then you pay.

Sloppy managers and lax fiscal controls aren't pertinent to companies that actually do check.

The companies check, they just realize that humans are human. There are procedures for ensuring that cash handling errors are never made, but they are so wildly expensive and time consuming compared to the option of not hunting down a $.73 discrepancy that it isn't worth it. The procedures typically involve multiple employees counting (this is how the discrepancies are found at the end of the day), or counting all cash in triplicate (this is what bank tellers are doing when they give you the money, they are counting it out for their sake). It is a trade-off that competent management makes, you don't hire two cashiers for every register, and ask them to count everything in triplicate for the sake of a few pennies.

This isn't going to conform to your worldview, but even ATMs and automatic bill accepters make errors. There is a procedure for cash discrepancies even when you take the human out of the loop.

Doubtful. It's required to keep a running balance of net cash contained so that it can be manually counted and reconciled for creating that day's bank deposit. Percentage of money type is meaningless to this fact.

Not at all, some POS systems will account for rounding, but most don't. One only needs to look at your receipt to see if this is the case. Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

Also, in Canada, I have never seen those automatic change-making machines that are common in US convenience stores. Cashiers always count and handle cash by hand.

> Cash registers are nearly always out a dollar or two at the end of the day anyway, that's normal, and cash rounding doesn't change that much.

This is human error, not a software design error.

The point is that it doesn't matter, it all evens out in the end.

I'm not sure what you mean by that platitude.

The mental and physical cost of worrying about a few cents isn't worth it.

We should get rid of the Nickle as well.

It also costs 3x it's face value to produce, and is also effectively worthless. Many other countries have 10c or 20c as their smallest denomination.

And we aren't those countries.

Not sure what your point is. "Concepts that have been proven in other countries are irrelevant here"? Or just "We have nothing to learn from what others have done and should start every idea from scratch"?

Your snarky summaries are actually extremely close to the sentiment I hear a lot.

A shocking amount of "political" thinking in the us that I've been involved with STARTS with "we're the best at everything" and then explores things to do from there

We collectively have this fragile ego that would rather feel tough and "self made" rather than admit any kind of deficit compared to others, even at the expense of our own growth. It reminds me of a ceo I used to work for that I flippantly described as happier to feel like a big fish in a small pond than to put his ego to the side in exchange for the ability to improve and expand the business.

Maybe we should try, as a nation, to stop being so intensely stupid and close minded.

Presumably we could come up with a reformulated nickel that is much less costly to produce. It hasn't been changed outside of war issues in a long time.

The reformulated penny didn't take too long to be accepted. A new nickel would probably be accepted well too.

> The reformulated penny didn't take too long to be accepted. A new nickel would probably be accepted well too.

Part of the problem is with how vending machines detect valid currency

Story about when the dollar coin was updated https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2000/06/13/vending-chan...

Pennies aren't accepted by vending machines generally.

I can't imagine nickel fraud for snacks and beverages is particularly lucrative.

The issue isn't a much fraud for nickels as it would be failure to accept the coin, and just taking your money.

Easily the most sensible thing he's done. Lots of countries have done away with low value coins, and it's not like they're vital for payment. Nothing costs mere cents anymore.

In this case it would be the fact that the order is unconstitutional.

How is it unconstitutional?

The "coinage clause" of the Constitution.

https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation37.html

> Article I, Section 8, Clause 5 is known as the coinage clause. It gives Congress the exclusive power to coin money. The Supreme Court has also interpreted clause 5 as giving Congress the sole authority to regulate every aspect of United States currency.

That supreme court interpretation is from 1820 so it's both "settled law" and "an outdated ruling", depending on who you ask.

Doesnt that make the fed unconstitutional as well?

No, but only because it was officially created by act of Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act

This doesn't eliminate the penny, just pausing production of it. If he had unilaterally declared the penny no longer valuable then that would be unconstitional and require an act of congress

The distinction you make is irrelevant since both are under Congress' responsibility. The president has no constitutional authority to determine which currency is minted and how much of it is minted.

Secretary of Treasury works for President.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title31/sub...

This law does not mandate continuous minting. So I think you are wrong that the Secretary of Treasury does not have the ability to say how much of a coin is produced day to day.

Legal scholars, such as Laurence H. Tribe, have noted that U.S. law grants the Treasury Secretary the authority to determine the quantities of coinage necessary to meet the needs of the United States. Therefore, if the Secretary decides that the required amount for a particular coin is zero, they are within their legal rights to stop its production.

Congress does not mint coins, and this order does not coin new currency. They are separate concerns.

The Constitution doesn't say anything about denominations, metals, and so on. That's under Title 31 of the U.S. code, section 5111-5112, "Minting and issuing coins, medals, and numismatic items", which grants the Secretary of the Treasury control over how much to mint, and in the case of denominations, it says the Secretary "may" (not "must") mint them. The Secretary can simply decide to not mint any.

The change itself is ok. The issue is who can make the change, and that would be congress not the president.

Title 31 says the Secretary of the Treasure can. The Secretary cannot permanently cancel the penny, but they can stop making them.

That's mentioned in the article as a "might". Let's see in practice.

It's kind of ridiculous that the US has held onto pennies for this long. New Zealand phased out our 5 cent coins back in 2006, approximately 3 US pennies worth at present.

You don't even need to look at other countries, when the US discontinued the half penny it was worth more than modern nickels are worth

It's ridiculous that anyone is saying anything but fuck this traitor for issuing unconstitutional orders over and over again.

What’s unconstitutional about it?

The authority over U.S. coinage is established in the Constitution (Article I, Section 8), which gives Congress the power "to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof." Any major changes to U.S. currency, including eliminating a denomination, must go through Congress.

>“The Secretary of the Treasury shall,” Section 5111 reads, “mint and issue” denominations of coins “in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.”

I agree with your sentiment, but according to another comment in this thread, the treasury secretary has congressionally approved latitude to adjust how many coins are minted.

Is there a tariff on practices imported from Canada?

I'll suggest to the CAN powers-that-be to impose an export tariff on the intellectual property.

I've been holding onto every pre-1982 penny I come across, because I one day want to get 499 of them, and take them to Mexico or Canada to smelt them to use in some kind of art project.

When we finally stop making pennies in the US, will that make it legal to melt them down?

Probably not, Treasury doesn't 'demonetize' old issues. Generally speaking, any coin or bill issued by the Treasury department still officially has its face value and is legally money.

But if you'd like, I've got a small bucket of 1943 steel pennies.

A whole bucket full? I'll trade you my zinc pennies for your steel ones.

It's legal to melt them down now. You can't deface U.S. currency to try to make it look like it's higher value, or to shave small amounts of metal to combine with other coins shavings to the point that they have value. As per [1]:

> 18 U.S. Code § 331

> Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or

The key word is "fraudulently", if you're doing it for art you're good.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/331#:~:text=§%203...

Interesting, I always assumed it was covered by the same law that makes it illegal to burn bills (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/333), but apparently not.

NPR's Planet Money podcast said that it is illegal to melt the pennies, and that there are a bunch of penny collectors waiting for the day it is legal.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/676247474

I have to say though... are the value in coins intrinsic or as a medium of exchange?

Although I've heard pennies just end up in a drawer, don't they have value to the economy to exchange (many times) goods and services back and forth for coins?

is it just convention nowadays, left over from storing gold?

What's your question exactly?

I have a similar question. I always heard/read that the whole "pennies cost more to make than they're worth" argument was a red herring, in that it doesn't really matter how much they cost to make "at rest". But, rather, the value of a penny is in how much wealth it allows to be transferred over its life in circulation. In other words, if a penny does cost about 3.69 cents (or whatever they say the number is today) to mint, then it is "worth it" as long as the penny is used 4 times EVER.

I'll admit that I really haven't given much thought to the topic in any case. But, even in just the time it's taking me to write this comment, I'm realizing it's probably a little of both "sides" being right. After all, a penny is both a medium of exchange as well as a store of wealth/value, depending on how you use it...

It matters because if you can extract more than a penny's worth of metal from a penny, then you make money by buying as many pennies as you can get and melting them down to sell the metal.

Which is simultaneously illegal, antisocial, and logistically difficult.

True, but that won't stop people.

next move, please finally enforce the switch to the metric system!

if you want to cement your legacy as US president, that would do it.

I don't think anyone is in doubt about this presedency being legendary. We mostly disagree on the context the legend will be told in.

This is Trump we're talking about. 100% guarantee that if the metric system crosses his mind, he'll actively try to rid the world of it any way he can. He'll claim it's "gay" or some other stupid shit he thinks and ban teaching it in schools. He doesn't care about any "legacy". He's just there to do as much harm as he can manage in the short time he's got left on this planet.

It's partly because a large number of people smugly hold such a simplistic, stupid and completely unreflective view of the guy and the political/social currents he's both ridden and manipulated, that he has been able to get so far in politics. Trump is all kinds of unpleasant things, but a screaming orangutan of rage and stupidity he isn't.

Even as it stands, his entire political career since 2016 is a very unique chapter in U.S. political history, which will be judged as such in many complex ways across the coming decades. This is not simply the result of an incredible number of coincidences favoring a complete, screaming idiot.

He’s basically a variant of Andrew Jackson [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson], but scammier.

What always has blown me away is how many people insist Trump is dumb, while clearly being manipulated by him.

I’m no fan, but the dude is clearly crafty AF and has balls the size of basketballs. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be in the white house again making everyone miserable.

I think that's a common phenomenon that I see among both right-wing and left-wing Americans. Both are convinced that the other side's leaders are morons and refuse to entertain the possibility that the other side is full of intelligent people with different, even alien, priorities.

There are plenty of both screaming orangutans and postmodern anti-humanists out there, but the ones that end up in positions of power instead of the homeless shelter are there because they have far more intelligence than the average person. They may be deficient in technical knowledge, but that's because they spent their time learning how to manipulate minds instead of learning how to manipulate bits or atoms.

He is. I mean he is rage and hatred. Is he stupid? No worse then dumb he's lazy. Hes smart at scamming people and selling himself but he has neither knowledge of how policy can theoretically improve people's lives and is too lazy to try to learn about it. Luckily or unluckily he's also had at carrying things out, see the whole infrastructure week debacle compared to president Biden who passed two large infrastructure bills.

>No worse then dumb he's lazy.

If you really think this given Trump's trajectory, visibly tireless and constant efforts to make something even more dramatic of himself (as repugnant as some of those efforts are to behold) and his self-serving successes across many years, now multiplied via one genuinely remarkable inroad into mainstream, top-level U.S politics just a decade after being considered a joke by most of the established political landscape, then i'd say you're being lazy about very basic research and dumb in forming a cliched caricature of someone you dislike mainly because you dislike them.

He is a cliched caricature.

Just because he succeeded doesn't make him not a joke. What it says about our country ... well its not particularly good and I don't like to think about it.

Im sure he can hustle for himself although tireless and constant are not words I I would use especially as he's gotten even older. But his intellectual laziness that has been well documented. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/29/politics/trump-intelligen...

what would you call the quarter pounder?

Royale With Cheese. But let's not start sucking each other's cocks quite yet.

in german "pfund" has been adapted to mean 0.5kg and remains in use as a colloquial term for that to this day. so you can keep calling it a quarter pounder.

a quarter pound is pretty dang close to a tenth of a kilogram (0.113 kg, to be more precise). We have a little-used prefix for that: A 'hectogram'.

A Krusty burger with cheese!

We lose money minting pennies and nickels. Both should be abolished.

Dimes, quarters and dollar coins.

If we lose $100 curing all diseases should we stop doing it? It’s just an odd argument for government - the purpose wasn’t profit and the argument that it was will put entitlements on the chopping blocks with the same excuse.

Research towards curing diseases has a clear potential benefit. The continued minting of nickels and pennies does not.

Yes, we agree it’s not about the cost. As long as the benefit remains, the loss can be assessed. A negative return alone doesn’t automatically disqualify a program.

This is all going to. E irrelevant when everything is crypto

This is not a new proposal by any means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...

It's amazing how everything is a debate in America, even blantantly obvious things like getting rid of the penny. The Nickle should also go.

Actually doing it would be a very new thing, and could be inflationary (since the US doesn't have a 2c coin). Imagine prices and change being rounded (up) to the nearest nickel. [0] says Trump doesn't have the legal authority to order the Treasury to do this, that power rests with Congress. I can't see that happening when inflation is already a big issue. (Euro 1-cent and 2-cent coins are made of copper-covered steel, so I don't even see any necessity for Trump's decision.)

- If this actually happened it could be worse than the (temporary) inflation caused in Europe when the Euro was adopted at the start of 1999; due to the exchange rate, merchants in Germany and Greece rounded up prices. But this would be worse, the Euro had 1-cent and 2-cent coins, whereas the US would be moving the lowest-denomination from 1c to 5c. Canada abolished its 1p coin in 2012. Mexico's lowest-denomination coin today is 50 centavos (~ USD $0.024) [1]

- Also, phasing out the penny could result in needing to make more nickels, and the US Treasury Department loses far more money on every nickel than it does on every penny: each nickel costs 13.8 cents (11c production costs + 2.8c of administrative and distribution costs). [2] And nickels are heavy and bulky to carry compared to dimes. So imagine if the lowest-denomination coin people moved to using was 10c. Ya think that wouldn't be inflationary?? (Or moving to electronic ap-based payment for everything like in China, which US consumers are resistant to.)

[0]: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2025-02-1...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/business/costs-of-pennies-and...

Reminds me of the Japanese sen and how it was discontinued post WW2 for becoming too negligible.

Don't we need a law that permits rounding of prices though?

If stores round down, they can potentially collect too little sales tax. If they round up, they're charging above the advertised price which, afaik, is fraud.

> If stores round down, they can potentially collect too little sales tax. If they round up, they're charging above the advertised price

The first case is a non issue. The store is making less money. The second can be settled through the courts.

The former is an issue, at least in California.

https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/lawguides/annotations/460-0198.pdf

It can be done, but it appears a retailer has to either indicate that they are undercollecting sales tax to the customer - and make up the difference themselves - or use all-inclusive pricing rather than adding sales tax to the bill, and back out the tax from totals to calculate gross sales.

Sales tax is a state issue, so president doesn't have to care.

Fraud charges could be avoided with careful asterisking, and lack of enforcement of de minimus fraud.

While we're talking currency, we need to start making a $500 bill again. The $500 bill was removed in 1969 making the $100 bill the largest denomination. In 1969, $100 was worth around $860.

Here is a thought - how about engineering deflation until the penny become valuable again? Will take decades though.

Make the penny great again!

Brilliant idea! We also should probably stop nickels and dimes at this point and maybe even quarters.

With inflation about to go up to absolutely insane levels, it might be reasonable to round cash transactions to dollars. Cash is still essential for transactions without requiring technology, creating traceable metadata, or disadvantaging the unbanked.

Let's wait until it's a problem. You can round up to the nearest dollar if you want to.

I think we should jump straight to hundred dollar bills at this rate

That will be next year. The year after that, America be buying things in units of wheelbarrows of bricks of hundreds before switching to the Zimbabwean dollar. ;)

What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece[1]

[1] https://graal.ens-lyon.fr/~abenoit/algo09/coins1.pdf

I haven’t used coins since about 2009 (I mostly pay with card or phone, and if I don’t, I just leave the change behind.). The exception to the rule was probably some tolls and parking meters. I’d probably ditch but quarters. Those still make sense otherwise I’d expect all the points where you can pay with coins to jack up the prices to the nearest dollar, regardless of how you pay (and each item individually).

I also don’t know how I feel about $1 coins. One buck has such a low value in these days that it almost doesn’t make sense to have it in “paper” but I cannot imagine going back to coins.

I almost have a Trump changes bingo. Waiting for renaming a day of the week or a month, and going to war with either Switzerland or Italy.

Seriously, this one isn't actually dumb, dramatic, or insane. I approve.

Wow, an actual good idea from Trump. What a pleasant surprise.

It won't be needed with inflation caused by the new import taxes.

This seems like a silly and easy thing to do but it hasn't gotten done. It has been on the to-list for years if not decades. Special interest and voter pushback has always stopped it. It looks like President Trump will finally make it happen. I think it speaks to the strength of his presidency. We are in for a lot of changes.

Cant wait for his next move!

Maybe he renames thursday to Trumpday and awakens the almighty Thors wrath.

Maybe he and Twitler builds a golf course on mars.

> Maybe he renames thursday to Trumpday and awakens the almighty Thors wrath.

I mean, there's precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_renaming_of_Turkmen_month...

(Hopefully nobody has told him about this.)

the less Trump knows about the Turkmanbashi the better

... or Admiral-General Aladeen, for that matter.

Has he achieved anything during first one?

He did sign a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA, which he at the time described as 'they say it's one of the best trade deals ever made'. To be fair, though, the deal also has its critics. For example, Donald Trump said of the deal: 'who the hell made these deals, they're so bad'.

What’s a to-list?

to-do-list presumably.

Flooding the zone with both reasonable sh* and unreasonable sh* is still flooding the zone with sh*.

Notice the timing of his statement. Right in the middle of the largest sporting event in the US. Eyes were elsewhere and it brought them back to himself.

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