‘Wasteful’: Trump Orders Treasury to Stop Producing Pennies
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents.”
President Donald Trump told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to stop minting pennies. He wrote on Truth Social:
For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies. Let’s rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it’s a penny at a time.
🚨 BREAKING: President Trump instructs the Secretary of the Treasury to stop production of the penny pic.twitter.com/ZuVkDRabch
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 10, 2025
I wonder how many leftists and Democrats will react. I saw many videos spanning years about why we need to drop the penny.
The penny is worth 1 cent.
DOGE said it costs over 3 cents to make a penny.
The penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023.
The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced.
Penny (or 3 cents!) for your thoughts.
Sources:https://t.co/Y5LlrpyA62…
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 22, 2025
US MINT: In 2024, each penny cost 3.69 cents to make — the 19th straight year its production cost more than its value. pic.twitter.com/NL3Qt3teqk
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 10, 2025
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Comments
Pennies are a pain in the … to count and roll. I will not miss them.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
Now days a penny saved is a penny taxed. Nickels are worth more also….so watch them degraded . Yes,a penny was worth something before inflation.
Another day another 50 cents after tax.
A penny not made is 3 pennies saved!
We owned a house in Prince Edward Island for fifteen years, during which time the Canadian penny was obliterated. In all truth, it didn’t make any noticeable difference.
I didn’t realize the penny was costing so much more than it’s value.
Gotta LOVE Trump!
interestingly, there is a coin instead of a dollar bill called a
‘
Interestingly, there is a coin instead of a dollar bill called a ”Loonie” and a coin for a two dollar bill called a “Toonie.”
‘loonie
‘ and a coin worth two dollars called a
‘toonie
‘
I don’t know how, but this all became “fubar.”
Do not us the “xerox” button as an “edit” button.
To be honest, I’ve been retired for a few years now, so I’m a bit removed from the hustle and bustle of daily commerce so my experience may be atypical but I think that I have only used cash in any form (when in the U.S.) perhaps twice or three times in the past few years.
On the other hand, I have a jars of pennies from the 1950’s and 1960’s which might have one among the mass that’s worth something which I’m going to sell to some coin collector’s shop someday…, someday…someday.
About the only thing I use cash for anymore is tipping (valet parking is huge where I live). 90% of what I spend is done through ApplePay, most of the rest is credit card and then cash. Even the parking meters in my city can be filled with a proprietary app or ApplePay now, and that was the only reason I ever kept coins in my car. I never keep coins in my pocket anymore. It’s odd how quickly coins and even cash are being made redundant.
I am at about that stage myself, except it is Google-Pay or whatever non-Samsung Android pay is called this week. “Ka-chung!” and it’s paid, and I pay it down in full when the statement hits.
The only time I pay cash now is when there is a credit card surchage.
I use Cash alot, including coins. I use ATMs, too. I do this because once all my transactions, all our transactions, are totally electronic, it’s entirely too easy to completely kill my ability to live if the government or anyone financial entity decides to “deplatform” me.
It also means the government can know EVERYTHING I do, and frankly that ability offends me greatly. Not having it.
Liberty requires a little work and protection.
Loss of privacy is the main problem with the mad rush towards a cashless society. Throw programmable money in with that and it’s a recipe for disaster. Of course that’s precisely what politicians and totalitarians want, so they can tax the crap out of every transaction, “eliminate” black market activity (not really, but they think they will, and that’s a problem), and use financial control to coerce social engineering.
Another thing that people tend to forget or overlook is the tendency to overspend or otherwise engage in mindless consumerism when you have only electronic money. There’s something sobering when you had a wad of cash in your pocket and it all gets pissed away quicker than you realize if you don’t keep track of it. Using plastic all the time promotes an “eh, don’t worry about it, I’ll figure it out later” mentality.
This is a stupid idea. The smart idea is a redenomination of our currency. It will make coins useful again, make figures more manageable, and magnify the observation of future inflation. It would be nice to have a fresh start whereby a dollar means something. If promoted well in advance, it would not present many problems except for gangsters fearing to exchange their old bills.
Plus, it would choke our government’s tax revenues as millions of taxpayers compute capital gains badly.
The USA stopped producing its 1/2 cent coin in 1857.
Also in 1857, the large one cent coin was discontinued, and the small one cent coin was introduced.
So was the Indian Head Penny the first “woke” symbol?
I had a roll of common Indian Heads and a roll of Liberty Head Nickels and every month I would drop one in the wood chips at the playground, where metal detector guy would find it, which would encourage him to come back there, and while looking for those he would also find the stuff that was hazardous to the children like nails, etc. I wonder if he ever figured out he was working for me for 50 cents and hour.
“So was the Indian Head Penny the first “woke” symbol?”
No. It was a penny with the bust of an Indian on it. There were no social justice warriors in those days.
Today, I am not at all offended or bothered about Susan B. Anthony or Sacajawea being on the dollar coin the few times I encounter them. They spend just as well as a coin with a dead politician stamped on it.
The Brits and Irish will call pounds, shilling, and pence “LSD”. My Irish father told me a joke once (which I can’t remember) and the punch line was “as long as you have lots of LSD, you’re good to go!”
I understand that harridan Pocahontas “Speaking Bull” Warren served as the model for the coin.
Good. According to the BLS, the CPI has increased 10x in the last 60 years. So rounding prices to a penny in 1965 would be equivalent to rounding to a dime now. So drop the nickel too. And fix inflation.
This. We don’t need to deal in hundredths of dollars anymore than we need deal in thousandths. Tenths are sufficient.
And yet pump prices for gas have used mills since forever.
if you put the last first, it might fix the value of the penny and the nickel.
I’m just afraid we’re headed towards the point my mother’s brothers used to tell stories about:
in pre-revolution Ukraine two of her brothers each took a wheelbarrow full of rubles to the market to return with one can of chickpeas
Clearly we need to address inflation, but I don’t think we’re going back to 1960s price levels, e.g. deflation, That would likely cause even more problems and distortion. We need a stable currency.
Found one!
What! No more $23.99?
Nope, just three fitty.
Prices can still end in 0.99. They do in other countries that have got rid of actual cent coins. When paying electronically there is no problem at all. When paying in cash, retailers are officially told to round the total to the nearest 5 cents, but in practice they usually truncate it to the lower 5¢. They lose up to 4¢ per transaction, which is less than the goodwill they would lose by taking advantage of their legal right to round it.
TRUMP SAID A MEAN THING ABOUT THE PENNY! THIS WILL COST US THE NUMISMATIST VOTE! WE’LL NEVER REVOVER FROM HIS ILL-CONSIDERED HATEFUL RHETORIC!
/moonmouth
The story goes, the owner of the Chicago Daily News wanted to price his newspapers at a penny, but there weren’t all that pennies in common circulation. He convinced shop owners to price items at 99¢ rather than $1 so that customers would have more pennies to jingle in their pockets and available to buy his paper.
Probably not true (there are a lot of stories about the 99¢ phenomena) but a good story nonetheless.
What a paper newsrag worth these days, if anyone reads them? $1.50? $2?
Actually, most of today’s newspapers are worthless because they have no credibility.
Stopping making new pennies does not mean we’re stopping using pennies. There are plenty in circulation, and will be for q long while.
Turns out the same was true of “assault weapons.” Woops.
In 1980 our pizza shop rounded everything to the nearest 5 cents so we wouldn’t be wasting time with pennies.
Also around then, they quit making pennies out copper and making them out of zinc slugs with a very thin veneer of copper for looks. Those things just corrode and dissolve eventually.
It’s about time. Thanks, Trump and DOGE!
That’s why I’ve been hanging on to every pre-1982 penny I’ve come across. The later pennies are a joke.
Just spitballin’ here, but suppose Trump / DOGE / Treasury / Mint / whoever-the-eff returned America to hard currency? Make the pennies out of copper, and the dimes and quarters out of 90% silver?
MAKE MONEY GREAT AGAIN …
Nickel for your thoughts doesn’t have the same ring to it.
There will no longer be pennies from heaven.
Acktually…🧐
I think that “Pennies from Heaven” is probably from 1935 or so… I can’t be assed to actually check… but anyhow I did pull up the CPI Inflation calculator and “A penny for your thought” is quite a different thing than it was in 1935:
$0.01 in 1935 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $0.23 today, an increase of $0.22 over 90 years.
For what it’s worth 😁
I’m so old I remember buying penny candy for one cent!
RIP, Take a Penny, Leave a Penny.
Penny Pritzker hardest hit.
Okay, then! It’s about time. As for the general public I am already reading about how that rich bastard is taking away the penny, that things will cost more whine whine whine.
My experience with penny-free shopping has been on military bases when I was doing my energy survey work. We civvies were allowed to use the Shopettes at the very least, and sometimes got full commissary and BX privilege. If your purchase came up to, say, $17.42, you paid $17.40. If it came up $17.43, you paid $17.45. Virtually no-one groused about it.
Now, a modest proposal. Settle on a design and size for a $1 coin, and for a $2 coin, and then phase out the $1 and $2 notes. They are outright silly. One dollar no longer even buys the candy bars I bought too many of for five cents when I was a child. They are an anachronism.
Canada phased out their $1 note; there is no one-Euro note. No one-Pound notes, no pennies either. Enough already. Times have changed.
I would miss the $2 notes terribly.
One, they honor my main man, Thomas Jefferson.
Two, it would deprive me of a source of leisure-time amusement, when I hand a zoomer checkout clerk a $2 and she tells me it isn’t real money and calls her manager.
So the problem I see with this is tax. Stores can round everything to flat dollars or multiples of five. But then you tack on a 7% sales tax in my state. Or 12.5 if you live in Chicago. How does that alger accounted for with cash?
*get accounted for
Was the esteemed Mr. Hiss involved in programming your speech-to-text? ;-{)}}}
You can keep prices down to the penny, and just round the final total to the nearest nickel. Rounding at each step is probably the most common way to introduce rounding errors.
Eliminating pennies needn’t automatically mean all prices must end in a multiple of five cents – but you can be sure that’ll be the excuse that is used.
Easy. You only round (or truncate) the final amount, including everything. Your final bill is $7.39; if you pay by card, that’s what you pay, while if you pay by cash you pay $7.35 and the store eats the other 4¢. Or if they don’t care about pissing you off, they charge you the legally allowed $7.40, but in my experience in such countries I’ve never seen a store that did it.
Ahem.
We have cents, not pennys.
Britons have penny’s.
Just my two cents.
Paedantic, are we? -chuckle-
And Britons have pence (plural). Slang is “pee” as in “I have 20 pee”. Lots of use of diuretics in Britain I guess…
“Pee” is to distinguish them from “dee”, which were the old pennies, 240 of which made a pound. (D from the Roman denarius.)
We HAD Cents… now we have sense.
“Arcade machine manufacturers hardest hit.”
Next up: Dollar bills versus $1 coins. Seems I recall the effort has been made several times to convert due to the printing costs, but the local senator where the George’s are printed has repeatedly squashed the idea due to the jobs that would be lost/relocated.
Forward-looking statement: Any 2025 pennies you come across will someday be collectors’ items., so keep an eye out.
“so keep an eye out.”
Sounds painful.