I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of all these useless pennies, nickels and dimes!!! What good are they; you can't buy anything with them anymore! I think that the smallest unit of currency in a society should be the price of a pay phone call -- which is now 25 cents in New York. I propose that the US Government stop minting all coins under a quarter. The annual savings to the government could easily be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The annual savings to the banking industry and other organizations that have to process huge numbers of small coins would be potentially even greater. The money saved by the US Government from not minting small denomination coins should be used to fund new programs for the homeless. Talk about giving someone some "spare change!"
I read a report years ago that talked about the hundreds of millions of dollars the Fed gets
to float for free due to all the loose change that is floating around and never cashed in.
It's like owning a store and selling gift certificates all day - with the vast majority of certificates never making it back for a purchase.
It's good to be the king.
Posted by: Tombstone | December 28, 2004 at 09:43 PM