US to Stop Producing Pennies in 2026
axios.com24 points by bdev12345 4 hours ago
24 points by bdev12345 4 hours ago
This triggered a thought which led me to doing a quick calculation that I haven't done in years...
So, modern pennies are just copped plated zinc. But up to 1982 (barring some small interruptions like the 1943 steel penny) they were 95% copper. There was roughly 2.95 grams of copper in each penny.
Current copper prices seems to be approximately $12.31/kg or $0.0123/gram. That is about $0.036 per pre-1982 penny. Round down to 3 cents/penny to account for recycling costs. If you took all pre-1982 copper pennies you could out of circulation yourself you could make a 3x return!
(I have no idea how many pre-1982 pennies are still in circulation and it seems like this isn't public knowledge. Something tells me this endeavour to recycle them, as an individual, would never be fruitful. Also... my memory is that there is some question of legality in destroying currency en masse...)
The metal content value of nickels surged past the face value in 2006, so the law was updated to prevent this very idea:
https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20061214-united-s...
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2007/04/16/E7-7088...
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-31/subtitle-B/chapter-I/p...
Pursuant to this authority, the Secretary of the Treasury has determined that, to protect the coinage of the United States, it is necessary to generally prohibit the exportation, melting, or treatment of 5-cent and one-cent coins minted and issued by the United States. The Secretary has made this determination because the values of the metal contents of 5-cent and one-cent coins are in excess of their respective face values, raising the likelihood that these coins will be the subject of recycling and speculation.
I believe plenty of people already do hoard pre-1982 pennies for this exact reason.
And the laws only apply within the country (although bulk exportation is generally illegal). In Australia in the 1920s and 1930s there was a bit of illegal exporting of silver coins to South-East Asia due to the high silver content.
I recall there being people who hoard buckets of copper pennies for this exact purpose. You can't melt them down unless it's for an educational purpose, so they have buckets and buckets waiting for the law to "change" (pun intended).
> You can't melt them down
Sure you can, you just have to find an unscrupulous copper merchant to sell it to. Not a difficult task - they've been around for thousands of years.
>> You can't melt them down unless it's for an educational purpose
To educate people about the strength and resiliency of markets.
What's the energy cost of melting that penny? 1.5¢? That'll eat into your profits.
Discussion (36 points, 2 months ago, 25 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44069037
The 12 1/2 cent coin suggestion is brilliant and deserves more discussion, so I'm bringing it back up here.
For those who don't know, the US Dollar was based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_real which was often broken into eight pieces to make change (hence, "pieces of eight" and "two bits"). Might as well bring it back while inflation lets us be nostalgic.
Great, now we just need to discontinue the dime, and make dime-sized nickels, or discontinue the nickel and quarter and bring back the half dollar, and we'll have a sensible coin system. When we discontinued the half penny, it was worth far more than a dime is now.
From Canadian experience, this is one of those things where the opponents of the change are much louder, appearing much more numerous than they actually are. In the end this was a widely popular move.
I agree. From what i’ve seen, people use debit/credit cards / their phone, so the rounding doesn’t even occur.
While visiting New Zealand in the 90's I had my first encounter with no pennies. Everything was rounded up/down. Was an initial shock that came to make tons of cents (intended). Glad the US is doing this.
I wish they would get rid of all coins - just issue smaller denomination notes if you really must have them.
I'm not against the end result, but I was taught that we lived in a Republic, not a dictatorship. This should have been done legislatively, not by executive fiat.
If the USA was a dictatorship, I don’t think you would be able to criticize your government on the internet.
At what point in the rise of Hitler do you think people stopped posting anonymous criticism about Hitler? Because I'm going to bet never.
Did Congress mandate the production of the penny? Or was the authority over what coins are produced (and how many of them) given to the Treasury?
As I understand it congress mandates which coins _can_ be minted and their specifications (denomination/physical size/markings/etc) then leaves it up to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine how many need to be produced to meet demand.
I think that's a bit beside the point. We all use physical money. An executive that respected the vox populi would leave this for the legislature, where everybody has elected representatives that can debate, wheel-and-deal, and act on that voice of the people.
There's an awful lot you can do, but shouldn't.
The President is also an elected representative. This isn't beside the point: if it's not legislatively mandated, this is American democracy working as designed.
If the voice of the people is the concern, there should just be a referendum. I for one would vote to save the penny.
1.) We stopped being a republic after the civil war removed state rights to secession.
2.) Congress holds the rights to the spending of the purse but not the making of the money in the purse.
We used to actually teach this stuff in schools but then the Boomers took power.
1. The states never had the right to secede. U.S. Constitution, Article VI: "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Article I, Section 10: "No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation .... No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War ..."
It is abundantly clear in the records of the Constitutional Convention, the text of the Constitution, the debates on ratification, and the Federalist Papers that the intent of the Constitution was to create a supreme national government, not a league of states.
2. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the authority to regulate currency. Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have power ... To coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof ..."
> We stopped being a republic after the civil war removed state rights to secession
A republic is a government where elected representatives make laws. The right of sub-national units to secede isn't a part of the equation, as far as I know.
I mean a republic could have a constitution where states have the right to secede. Wikipedia tells me the USSR is one such republic. But that's not part of the definition.