Stop making cents: US Mint moves forward with plans to kill the penny
By: Fatima Hussein and Alan Suderman (The Associated Press)
The United States cannot even manufacture pennies any longer.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration says making cents doesn’t make sense anymore.
The U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks and plans to stop producing the coin when those run out, a Treasury Department official confirmed Thursday. This move comes as the cost of making pennies has increased markedly, by upward of 20% in 2024, according to the Treasury.
By stopping the penny’s production, the Treasury expects an immediate annual savings of $56 million in reduced material costs, according to the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the news.
In February, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to cease production of the 1-cent coin.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!” Trump wrote at that time in a post on his Truth Social site. “I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.”
There are about 114 billion pennies currently in circulation in the United States — that’s $1.14 billion — but they are greatly underutilized, the Treasury says. The penny was one of the first coins made by the U.S. Mint after its establishment in 1792.
The nation’s treasury secretary has the authority to mint and issue coins “in amounts the secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States.”Advocates for ditching the penny cite its high production cost — almost 4 cents per penny now, according to the U.S. Mint — and limited utility. Fans of the penny cite its usefulness in charity drives and relative bargain in production costs compared with the nickel, which costs almost 14 cents to mint.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Pennies are the most popular coin made by the U.S. Mint, which reported making 3.2 billion of them last year. That’s more than half of all the new coins it made last year.
Congress, which dictates currency specifications such as the size and metal content of coins, could make Trump’s order permanent through law. But past congressional efforts to ditch the penny have failed.
Two bipartisan bills to kill the penny permanently were introduced this year.
Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., introduced the Make Sense Not Cents Act this month. In April, Reps. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., along with Sens. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced the Common Cents Act.
Jay Zagorsky, professor of markets, public policy, and law at Boston University, said that while he supports the move to end penny production, Congress must include language in any proposed legislation to require rounding up in pricing, which will eliminate the demand for pennies.
Zagorsky, who recently published a book called “The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good for You and Society,” said otherwise simply ditching the penny will only increase demand for nickels, which are even more expensive, at 14 cents to produce.
“If we suddenly have to produce a lot of nickels — and we lose more money on producing every nickel — eliminating the penny doesn’t make any sense.”
Mark Weller, executive director of the Americans for Common Cents group — which conducts research and provides information to Congress and the Executive Branch on the value and benefits of the penny — says “there has been an evolution over the past six months that inevitably the production of the penny will be halted.”
His group advocates for the U.S. to find ways to reduce the cost of producing the nickel, especially since it will be more in demand once the penny is totally eliminated from circulation.
“It’s incumbent on Treasury to come up with a cheaper way to make the nickel,” Weller said. “Let’s make sure we’re making our coins as least expensively as possible and maintaining the option to use cash in transactions.”
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China could produce pennies for us -- at a discount. They'd use the scrap we ship to them because we're too lazy to produce anything with it.
Stupid is as stupid does. The United States can't even make money any longer.
What’s the problem? How often do you need a penny?
I need pennies for almost every purchase. I suspect you do, too. It's very rare that a purchase doesn't require pennies. I either use the pennies to pay for a purchase or I receive pennies as change. (I even use pennies for electronic transactions.)
It's difficult to avoid the need for pennies with a fractional sales tax or excise tax. A 6.5% sales tax will need to be rounded without pennies. Will tax authorities and retailers eat the fractions? It seems more likely that every purchase will be rounded up to the nearest nickel.
If anything, it's "very rare" that a purchase requires hard currency at all. Come into the 21st century, where we use plastic. Credit and debit cards are, by far , the most common form of payment for pretty much anything. Last year, only 16% of purchases were even made with cash, and that is a trend that continues downward, with no sign of reversing.
I don't even carry cash.
How could you possibly need a physical penny for an electronic transaction? Are you using a coin-operated computer?
So, you are one of those annoying elders making everyone wait in line while you grapple with counting pennies?
Yup, that's me. I don't have one of those nifty rubber change purses, though.
Canada has been doing that for 13 years without issue. America is "lazy" when it comes to any socio-economic change ... remember the transistor that Sony made countless billions of and from?
Anyhoot ... 'nice' to see y'all jump on the crypto-express just in time for it to derail.
Doesn't Canada have a sales tax? There's at least a 5% Federal sales tax. So, what is a 13% sales tax on any amount from $0.01 to $1.0? The tax on a $6.30 purchase would be $0.82. Do you expect the government to eat the loss in tax revenue by rounding down? You may be paying more taxes than you think you are.
Manipulating currency exchange rates has been a shady trade practice for a long time. Crypto ain't any different. Apparently the United States even has to import the gear to mine cryptocurrency.
The United States can't even make money any longer. That's what Harvard Business School has done to the United States. And Harvard takes pride in training foreign students to take advantage of the United States.
The gov does what businesses do, round up or down. As to sales taxes, Canada has what is called a GST tax similar to a VAT tax and no, they are not additional taxes on imported goods. From 0 to 2 cents the total is rounded down, at 3 cents the total is rounded up and everyone saves a bundle of time not waiting for you to appraise both sides of your pennies.
The United States can't even make money any longer.
That's just a silly observation.
Here's a listing of countries that have dispensed with their low value coins:
Pennies are easy. It's quarters and nickels that are the trouble.
The article explicitly states that it costs too much to manufacture pennies. That is the one and only reason the government is stopping production of pennies. We're told that's the reason manufacturing will never, ever, under any circumstance come back to the United States -- it costs too much.
Betcha China could produce pennies for the United States -- at a discount. The Chinese would be smart enough to change the feedstock. The Eurocentric economic model is to just chuck it and not care about consumer needs.
That is what Canada has actually done, isn't it? Didn't Canada just chuck it say 'screw you' to consumers?
At a cost of $0.0369 to manufacture 1 US cent, continuing their production falls into the lose-lose bucket.
I suggest you move out of the US and get a better appreciation of how the entire body economic works and not just the navel.
LOL. I'm one of those annoying elders. I do not use an iPhone or SmartPhone, and I don't use credit cards. I won't use my bank debit card because I won't spread the info it contains except for my use in my bank or its ATM. I follow my father's advice which was: "If you don't have the cash in your pocket, you can't afford it." It feels good to not owe a cent to anyone. And I have NEVER heard a complaint when I'm paying for something about being an annoying delayer.
Try that here and I'll whack you with my cane.
Canada stopped producing pennies 13 years ago, for the same reasons that the USA is doing so. And as you many know, Canada has even been producing "loonie" and "twonie" coins to replace $1 and $2 banknotes.
IMO Americans "Stopped Making Cents" when they voted for Trump.
Overdue, honestly.