Let's take a break from big deals to complain about something trivial for a moment:
Penny opponents look to save dollars and cents
In 2008, President Barack Obama tacitly endorsed its elimination, saying, "I will seriously consider eliminating the penny as long as we find another place for Lincoln to land."
Our President is willing to support an obvious reform of the monetary system, but only if it doesn't undermine the hagiography of a past President whose cult of personality has many devotees in his constituency.
Oy. We should never have allowed the Apotheosis of Lincoln to dislodge Liberty from US coins in the first place. It's all too imperial for a nation that still wants to pretend it's a classical liberal republic.
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How'sabout we shitcan FDR from the dime?
ReplyDeleteGood luck. Roosevelt usually hangs out with Lincoln at the top of Best Presidents Evar surveys, and his cult of personality is just as committed. And I figure we have at least five or six months before the dime is as irrelevant as the penny. ;)
ReplyDeleteI don't care about the coin, per se; but the existence of a penny as a unit of money allows small business owners to run a margin of less than 5% on quite small volume.
ReplyDeleteNo argument here. The absence of physical currency in the one-cent denomination wouldn't prevent anybody from making abstract transactions in one one-hundredth of a dollar. We make transactions in units of less than a cent already.
ReplyDeleteAll's I'm saying is that for transactions in meatspace, quantities finer than five cents can be rounded with less practical loss than the production and use of pennies causes.
It would murder mostly-cash businesses whose margin is under 5%; such as gas stations...
ReplyDelete'Round these parts, gas is almost always topped off to the nearest buck anyway. I couldn't speak for how common that is in pump-your-own states (you know--the entire rest of the Union ;) ).
ReplyDeleteBut then, while travelling, cash gas is almost always pay-in-advance, so people would always be dropping an evenly payable amount of money anyway. I still take your point, but gas stations may be the worst possible example. ;)
ReplyDeleteI generally go to stations that force cash customers to subsidize credit ones (same price cash and credit) and most of them don't bother to top off. Personally, in free states I don't bother to top off either.
ReplyDeleteGas stations matter because there's a bunch of them and they are often independent operators. Making them more likely to have to be managed instead of owned locally strikes me as a legitimate concern