Trump says no more pennies from the U.S. Mint

By
Suzanne Downing
-
65

President Donald Trump on Sunday said that the penny is a waste of government time and … er … money.

“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,” he wrote on his social media account.

It’s estimated that it costs the U.S. Mint 3.07 cents to produce one penny — more than three times its face value. According to JM Bullion, the U.S. Mint lost $179 million in 2023 due to penny production.

The debate over whether to continue minting the penny has gone on for years. In production since 1793, it’s kept in circulation due to its sentimental value, not its actual value.

Read the history of the penny at this U.S. Mint link.

65 COMMENTS

  1. The old adage it takes money to make money rang true. But when it takes more money than it’s worth to make it, it’s time to stop making it.

    On the plus side, all those rolls of wheat pennies my Grandpa saved just went up in value.

    • No, let’s not do that. The Europeans used to be into coins and I can tell you from experience carrying 100 in coins is way more bulky than bills. I guess that may be one reason Europe is going all plastic these days.

      • A Taxpayer, that is a profoundly stupid comment. Any idiot who would allow 100 or more coins in their pocket, rather than use them as they get them, deserves to have their pants fall down as a result.

        Europe is “going all plastic” simply because they are a much more meek, compliant and brainwashed people, and they buy into the lies of the sociopathic bankster and financial class to give up using cash in favor of 3rd-party Big Bank-issued credit cards, with all the fees, tracking, surveillance, loss of privacy, and risks of card and identity fraud inherent in their use.

        Everyone should ALWAYS use cash, in every situation remotely possible!
        The more you use credit cards, the more you surrender your freedom and privacy to those who greedily aim to accumulate both.

  3. The United States has NEVER minted a coin called the “penny”.
    They are “cents”, and always have been.
    But it is far past time to eliminate them. Also probably the five cent and ten cent coins, too.

    If we had kept our coinage and currency system up to date with the currency depreciation of the past 90 years, our smallest coin would be the quarter-dollar, and we would have coins of $1, $5 and $10 denominations, with bills of $20, $50, $100, $200, $500, $1000 and $2000.

    The fact that we do NOT such a coinage and currency system is due, I believe, to our government and various globalist forces trying to make the physical money system as impractical as possible, to force people out of using it and into an Orwellian cashless society. Which I will resist to the death.

    • Our fiat US-dollars have no intrinsic value. More than 90% of transactions with them are now electronic. Digital currency, such as Bit-Coin, Ethereum, XRP, Stellar, etc, is based upon blockchain technology; it cannot be added to or replicated. Its security is managed by each coin (file) having a transaction record attached every time the “coin” is traded. On the other hand, the government can declare your fiat paper dollar worthless at any moment. In fact, they do so constantly with their relentless creation of more dollars (inflation). Behold prices rising… that’s not what is happening in reality; rather, it is our dollars losing value as more and more are created by our government. The government fears digital currency that it does not directly control. People generally fear that which they do not understand.

    • That is a justification for keeping the penny that I can absolutely get behind.
      All the other ones.. not really much there, but the penny ante poker, yep. Solid reason.

  7. I’m not sure how this will work in practice. All items and taxes will have to be in whole numbers, in factors of 5. Many items are priced $x.99. Tax tables are in 3 digit odd numbered amounts. If every transaction rounds up to the next multiple of 5 (a nickel), who keeps the up charge? The business? The government? Will the up charge only apply to cash payments? Credit/debit will remain at calculation based on price and tax table? I know this sounds minor, until you calculate a 4 cent up charge on every transaction across the nation. Tens of thousands everyday? Who gets the money?

  8. Purchasing power of $100 USD since the creation of the Federal Reserve:

    1913: $100.00
    1923: $84.00
    1933: $60.00
    1943: $43.00
    1953: $32.00
    1963: $25.00
    1973: $18.00
    1983: $12.00
    1993: $8.00
    2003: $6.00
    2013: $4.35
    2024: $3.00

  9. Dollar bills will be next when tariff-induced Trumpflation kicks in and they are worth less than the cost of printing. Happily, we’ll all have $Trump sh*tcoin to spend instead.

    • Keep your Obama phone charged, Dog! Never can tell when you’ll need to roar off a few fresh disparaging remarks when next you hear of progress being made.

      In the interim you may want to call trump directly and request that he keep a red phone on his desk for whenever you have another critical assessment. I’ve read a ton of your posts and nearly all of them are disparaging, grossly liberal and incorrect. You may be on the wrong blog.

      Too often while reading one of your posts I’m reminded of one of Churchill’s responses to a letter he had rec’d:

      “Here I sit in the smallest room in the house w/ your letter before me. Soon it will be behind me”.

      Ever had an thought that was constructive?

      • Yes indeed. RESIST TRUMP AND MAGA. How’s that?

        And I’m reminded of another Churchill quote: “We know that Scrumptious Clam has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.“

        • The media accused Trump of going after some dark shadowy cabal of satanic pdf files, so I was like “Hell yea, imma vote for Trump!”.

          Then I saw the Democrats and all their sheep come out against him in defense of minor attracted persons or something like that.

          So now I see Trump taking out 2 useless things. Democrats and pennies. So much winning! I am getting way more than I even asked for!

          I as someone with nothing to lose see the only ones who are panicking about his presidency have something sinister to hide or are so hopelessly dependent on the corrupted system, that they can’t survive without it.

  10. So, how do vendors price their goods and services. When pricing an item or service and then adding sales taxes, do they round up or down to the nearest nickel ( five cents) or dime (ten cents)? What will that do the economy? Two or three cents difference in each transaction will eventually result in Billions of dollars one direction or the other. Who benefits?

  11. This move could be inflationary. A store that sells comething for $1.96 to $1.99 would then raise the price to $2.00. Multiply this times billions and billions of transactions per year, and American consumers could be paying billions more- way more then the savings the mint will see.

    The real solution is for the mint to reduce its costs.

    Note trump just imposed another sales tax on imported steel and copper. This too will be inflationary and make it harder to build things that require these materials. Home builders and home buyers are screwed.

    I’m tired of itdiots in government doing everything they can to make home ownership in this country more expensive. If its not the local parasitic governments with endless property tax hikes, its regulators making the cost of land and construction more expensive.

    Government, including Trump, is the enemy.

    • M,
      Of course you realize that by pricing something one penny below a whole dollar amount is done to fool people who do not understand simple math right? The difference in cost of something that is $1.99 vs $2.00 is half a percent, a rounding error. And yet some people wouldn’t buy an item if it were $2.00 instead $1.99, which means that those people will save $1.99 and not $0.01, last time I checked $1.99 is greater than $0.01. If pennies are removed and we are forced, through great hardship, to purchase items at $2.00 instead of $1.99 we will also be forced to purchase items that would have cost $2.01 at $2.00. Ultimately the $0.01 is a rounding error that will either equal out, due to the economies of scale, or it will make such little impact as to go completely unnoticed by people and businesses.

        • You guys need to understand that this is a zero sum game. One side will win at the expense of another. By ending the penny, we’d need more nickles. Nickles are more expensive than pennies. Poof. There go your cost savings. And again this is inflationary. Rational people can see this.

          Trump doesn’t have the authority to do this. Congress does.

          Finally, how does one deal in cash if a transaction can not be settled? I like cash, and don’t want to not have the choice to use cash- we have enough spying going on into our daily lives as it is.

          We’ve already seen, under Biden, federal agencies illegally telling Americans that they will not accept cash, you know, legal tender, for all debts, public and private.

          • Nickels hold more value than pennies, any rational person knows this. It’s almost a 5 to 1 ratio…oh wait no it’s exactly 5 to 1, unless you are talking about the amount required to make a penny vs the amount required to make a nickel…but you are working on that riddle right now and we will all wait with baited breath to hear your findings on if a penny that costs 3.7 pennies to make and a nickel cost 13.8 pennies to make, does it cost more to make a nickels worth of pennies or to just make a nickel?

    • This is a pressing (pun intended) issue. Trump is on a roll to cut waste spending. Printing out copper pennies has been a huge waste of time and resources for the past 30 years.

  14. With President businessman issuing 100’s of executive orders in the first month would it be too much to ask that one of them would address food and housing costs. Asking for most of the nation.

    • It took 6 months in his first term to undo the obama mess and get the prices lowering. I’m thinking since joey screwed it up even worse it will take longer. Be patient it will happen.

    • Yes. Bigger fish to fry ATM. Would it be too much to ask that you educate yourself to the point that you no longer require divine intervention in order to meet family financial obligations? That, or give the man some time before you beat that same dead horse again?

    • If you’re looking for compassion, Seb, you won’t find it here on MRAK where Christianity is a club and not an ethos.

      • I love your hypocrisy. You are on a religious crusade to shove your personal religion down everyone else’s throats. It’s hilarious.

  15. A penny for your thoughts, or it makes a lot of sense to stop making cents, that’s just my nonsense!
    I vote we print a 7 dollar bill (silver certificate) with Trump’s face on the front and Mt Rushmore with his face added on the back.
    For every 7 dollar bill printed, 7 million dollars of federal reserve notes must be removed from circulation with no replacement…

  17. So much for Rand Paul’s
    “six penny plan”.

    Raise the eligibility age for social security to save some real dough!

    Useless congressmen have had years to do what Trump has done in weeks. Soon they will just be zeros, sinecures.

  18. The non- government “federal reserve” is a criminal enterprise. Globalists create/print fed notes out of nothing but future debt. Previous civilizations would punch a hole in a coin and tell their subjects that it’s value was unchanged. A noteworthy method to prevent bad debt/lending was the Jubilee. A decree that all debt was erased at a set interval.

  19. Prices going up is not “inflation”. “Inflation” is when a government prints money in excess of what business produced that year. If you dont believe it, well, ask Milton Friedman. Prices rise for many reasons,”Inflation” is just one of them.

  20. Just briefly if you listen to Catherine Austin Fitts and use more cash than debit cards you are disrupting the cashless society plans. And Pres Trump has helped us by stopping CBDC for a few years. Take it to heart and enjoy the remnants of freedom.

  22. Why Trump is wrong about this:

    “Without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions. Far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burden,” said American for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded primarily by Artazn, the company that has the contract to provide the blanks used to make pennies.

    According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents, with 11 cents of production costs and 2.8 cents of administrative and distribution costs. These figures are for the government’s fiscal year, which ends on September.”

      • Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Korn. Sarc.

        Apparently you can’t digest facts to offer a reasoned discussion. I can’t fix your IQ.

        So lets keep this simple. It costs a lot more to produce nickels than it does pennies. With me so far? If Trump had his way, with his illegal plan, we would have to produce a lot more nickels, which are much more expensive to make. Is this too hard to understand?

        Taxpayers would not save money, but have to spend more.

        Jeezus.

    • M,
      How many pennies does it take to equal one nickle? Once you solve that riddle please let us know how much it costs to make one nickles worth of pennies, then compare the costs between making one nickles worth of pennies vs one nickle. Take your time, report back when you are confident you’ve arrived at the right answer.

  23. The penny is worth more than the sum of its parts. This is true of all goods. Money, including the lowly penny, facilitates commerce. Hard to put a price on that.

    • While you might not be able to put a price on it you can certainly put a value on it, knowing the difference between the two is the key.

  25. Since we don’t destroy old coins like we do paper money when it gets old, it will be a long time before Pennie’s are not used so don’t worry just yet about pricing changes as a result of this.

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