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Comment by rando001111 | Hacker News Reader

to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.

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I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing

This is one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none. Wasting money is bad. I should not have to explain further.

A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility.

It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes.

...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of exchange that signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less to make than they do.

does it change hands? when was the last time you actually used a penny to buy something? do you ever deposit your pennies into your bank account?

most people throw them in a change jar and forget about them.

I agree with you on that - that’s what my last paragraph was trying to convey. I don’t think pennies are necessary, and we are (were) wasting money making them. Nickels and dimes are probably in the same boat.

But I was replying to your reply to a comment which said “I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing” which you antagonistically and derisively called “one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none”. It wasn’t a stupid comment.

How long have you been on the internet? A day?

I would prefer if we do not spend billions of dollars each year on pennies when we could do something actually productive with that money.

People do not reuse pennies. They are lost and forgotten about much of the time.

A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.

[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.

[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.

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