Trump is killing off the penny once and for all. The metaphor is hard to miss. Killing off the least monetarily valuable layer of any group has been a right-wing political impulse for generations, not just for this administration. Preferably via simple apathy, because it’s more old-school refined, but organized neglect will do in a pinch.
For now, though, let’s stick to the endangered coin(s) at hand. The administration’s excuse is the fact that the cost of making a penny is more than one cent. And that’s true, it definitely does. But I have questions.
What does this portend for the nickel? The five-cent coin fails the profit margin test by a comparable percentage.
How does this not raise prices a little bit in the long-run? Some companies may round down during a transition to avoid vexing their customers. But after that, are businesses going to round down their pricing from penny-era levels, or will prices hike to the next $0.05 and dare buyers to notice? Everybody here lived through pandemic-era price gouging and shrinkflation, so I think we all know the answer to this one.
I see that a convenience store trade association has floated the policy that stores will adjust pricing to the *nearest* penny. Again, short-term, I could see it. Long-term, that’s adorable.
A slight but nearly universal increase in goods and services for no other reason than Trump Said So will surely help to bring down inflation through some sort of reverse-psychology mind-meld … right?
Don’t answer that.
Now let’s combine these questions. If the nickel has no stronger defense than the penny does, then the same dynamic would kick in again in the wake of its demise: Many prices would increase to the next dime. Multiply that over the scope of, well, everything that everybody buys. That’s bonus profit.
On the good side, maybe owners would channel all that free money toward higher wages.
HAHAHAHAhahahaha, I kid.
But why stop with coins? Are we running the federal government like a business here, or not? When will the Trump administration cut loose the takers and give a shout-out to all the makers, the states that send more money to the federal government than they get back?
Given that those states went 158-15 for Kamala Harris in 2024, don’t hold your breath.
This is clearly a good time to remind anyone and everyone yet again that most of the votes in the 2024 election were not cast for DJT.
Last question. Considering the Treasury’s other recent coin-related proposal, have you noticed that we’re looking at a scenario where less than two years from how, the U.S. could flip to Donald Trump’s face being on more sides of currency than Abraham Lincoln?
I see some good liberal-causes DJT-coin fundraising in our future.
I’m impressed by the utter silence over the demise of the penny from the usual suspects on the conservative side. You know, the ones who were so up in arms (almost literally) over new standards for light bulbs? To hear them tell it, incandescent bulbs practically came down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. Using megawatts of electricity to generate light no person could see and heat that was wasted was an affront to god and nature alike.
But the felon decrees the end of the penny because it costs too much to mint the coins, and MAGA just nods. Not a peep from coin collectors. The perpetually “outraged” segment of Fox News consumers is silent. It’s very peculiar to see a culture shift that has been greeted with a near-universal yawn from our fractious society.
CLEARLY the MAGAts got wind of my “hypervelocity penny-launcher” that was going to punch holes in their noggins.
“Penny for your thoughts” one might call it.
Alas, progress is much too slow.