A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned

A committee of the Senate in Canada has recommended that the one cent coin be discontinued. It is felt that there are too many of these coins already in circulation and that they are largely useless.

Here is how a letter writer to the Toronton Star responded to this notion.

Let me get this straight. A committee of the Senate wants to get rid of our one-cent coin because it's outlived its usefulness. Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black? Let's get rid of the Senate first and then work on our coins.

And by the way, Canada has never had a penny coin. That's a British denomination. Since 1858, we have had one-cent coins.

Bob Aaron, Toronto, Orillia

Mr. Aaron is obviously unelectable in Canada. He's too smart.

Getting rid of the penny is the sort of thing you hear from spelling reform morons, who don't understand that as long as people have different accents, there cannot be a uniform phonetic spelling for words. To think otherwise is to fall prey to a solipsistic illusion.

Similarly, Canadian senators, who rarely encounter the one cent coin as anything other than pocket ballast, have come to regard it as unnecessary.

I am far from a sophisticated maven on the subject of economics, but surely getting rid of the one cent coin automatically raises the price of everything four cents and under, upward to a nickel. Don't let those con artists at the banks or those simpletons at the Star tell you that there will be rounding off done in the opposite direction and that it will all even out.

Effectively, the Senate is saying that nothing is worth less than five cents. Is that true?

Well, no it isn't. That will be true only for people making cash transactions.

Credit card payments and payments by check will continue to be allowed access to that part of the number system below the value 5.

www.moneyville.ca...

The Senate committee is recommending the penny only be eliminated from cash transactions. It would continue to be recorded in bills paid by cheque or credit card.

Is there a hidden agenda here? Is government trying to phase out cash and to phase in comprehensively traceable transactions?

Need I ask?

The Senate is not saying from now on all economic forcasts will have an undetermined increase of up to 8% (4 up, 4 down) built into their margin of error. That margin of error has been downloaded just to your cash transactions.

The Senate is saying that charities all across the country can do without thousands of dollars worth of pennies, dropped into little boxes at the checkout counters of innumerable stores.

That is one of the most important uses of what to the Senate committee, is a useless coin. It shows how disconnected that "house of the connected" really is.

They aren't saying this but surely it follows that those crooked bank clerks, who have used various "rounding off" schemes to steal millions from banks, provide the paradigm by which millions of dollars will be stolen from the Canadian public, everywhere they shop.

Getting rid of the one cent coin is a sneaky way of stealing 4% of purchasing power from the cash portion of Canadians' spending.

Finance Minister Flaherty is not as stupid as a senator or an editorial writer for the Toronto Star, so he probably is aware that getting rid of the one cent coin will accelerate inflation.

I don't think this initiative will happen.

Surely there will be problems at the checkout counter. One will be presented with two bills. One bill, the accurate one will apply to payment by check or card. The other one, the rounded off one will apply to a cash payment.

This dog ain't gonna hunt.

One of the tip offs and surely a red flag for most people will be the observation in a Toronto Star editorial that:

www.thestar.com...

Australia and New Zealand have already scrapped their pennies. It is time for Canada to follow suit.

That's one of the most "Canadian" (intellectually constipated) observations I have ever read in the Toronto Star. And there's a recommendation for ya. An Australian did it, so it must be a good idea, lol.

Am I a know nothing crackpot, who should just shut up? (OK don't all answer at once.) Or am I right about this?

Keep the penny. Deduct 4% from all payments to senators.

reply to post by ipsedixit


It looks like a price increase instead of a tax increase but it has the same results...you paying more.I also think it is a way to force people into using plastic more in order to further the agend of eventually getting rid of cash altogether and having a cashless society.That article says it will reward credit card users by allowing a cent to be counted if they use their cards.They need you to get hooked on cards first.I don't think this the motive but it sure helps the cashless society conspiracy.The motive is ahidden price increase.An item that was 43cents now becomes 45cents.Looks similar to a new tax to me.

reply to post by DrumsRfun


There you go.

The politicians can spin it anyway they want but the end is more money taken from you and given to them.

I wonder if the government is actually using the Senate as a "stalking horse" on this one.

Sort of like when you have an idea you're not sure about and you don't want to sound stupid in front of your friends, so you get "Crazy Billy", the class clown to put the idea out so you can sit back and see how people react before you rush forward and scream "I've had it under study for several years now. It's nothing new.", . . . if they like it.

Essentially, when you remove the one cent coin from the monetary system, you recalibrate it, at least as far as the cash component goes, cruder.

It's like reducing the resolution of your camera or computer monitor. They then reflect what they are showing, less accurately.

Without the penny, the cash you carry in your pocket, will be less capable of reflecting the true worth of things you buy. It will only be able to reflect, i.e., match, an inflated or exaggerated value of what you buy. You will pay for more than you receive in "actual" value. . . and eventually "actual" value will be revised, across the board, upward by 4%. It's a little like taking a slow acting poison. You are not aware of it, at first.

Eventually you get used to it, and used to being weaker.

The copper in a penny became worth more than the actual coin.

This is a problem you get with a devalued currency. The penny we use now is only lightly coated in copper and has been for a few years trying to save the coin.

Even with a light coating on it, our penny is so worthless the light copper plating on it is worth more than the currency.

Congress is going to have to kill it. It's got more scrap metal value than currency value.

reply to post by Pervius

Couldn't a portion of the profit realized from printing the five dollar bill be used to offset the loss caused by having to mint the penny?

Any argument that includes references to the cost of producing the penny is entirely, pun intended, specious. The penny is not simply and only a commodity, like cuff links.

It is an integral part of the monetary system through which the economy facilitates transactions. The bolts that hold the wheels on your car are worth way more than the cost of producing them. The penny is like those things. Its utility within the monetary system is part of its value, (and is added to its value as a simple object).

Bringing up the notion of what it costs to produce the penny, in the context of a monetary system based on nothing is a fraud, designed to fool people who think our money is backed up by something more than expressions of good will.

People living in our time don't realize that there is a connection between the discontinuation of the penny and wheelbarrows full of billions of deutchemarks worth of paper notes being used to buy a loaf of bread in Germany after WW1.

If things are so bad in the economy that the pointed heads at the top are worried about cutting the costs of manufacturing the money, we are well and truly effed.

Originally posted by ipsedixit
Getting rid of the one cent coin is a sneaky way of stealing 4% of purchasing power from the cash portion of Canadians' spending.

Uh . . . No. That statement would only be true if each individual cash purchase made by Canadians amounted to 96 cents and was rounded up to 1 dollar.

The original statement sounds great but functions like an example from the book "How to Lie With Statistics". Lying wasn't my intention. I just had a lapse of critical thinking when I wrote the quote. Apologies to the house of "sober second thought". I still think getting rid of the penny is a bad idea, on the grounds of donations to charity, if nothing else.

If there are too many pennies in circulation and they cost too much to make, there is a very easy solution to that problem, one that doesn't seem to have occurred to the Australians and New Zealanders, and that is, "Don't mint them, unless you need to top up the supply."

From an earlier post it might be inferred that I don't like Australians. Nothing could be further from the truth, but aren't Australians really known more for fun than monetary policy. If an Australian were to advise me to put another shrimp on the barbie, or to have a Foster's or caution me that I was on the "Highway to Hell", I would certainly take them very seriously indeed. I just think that Canadians should think for themselves on monetary matters, even if the Star doesn't.

Well, They've Done It.

www.bloomberg.com...

Canada Stops Making Cents as Flaherty Lets Penny Drop

The longest-serving finance minister in the Group of Seven nations promised in his March 29 budget to save C$11 million annually by eliminating the coin that he says costs 1.6 cents to mint. The price of copper, which is used in the penny’s production, has surged more than 330 percent since 2000.

My compliments to the Bloomberg News headline writer. I couldn't have put it better myself. Dropping the one cent coin is a bad idea for all the reasons cited above in my posts.

Class assignment for Canadian MPs:

Read this thread one hundred times. Opposition MPs read thread two hundred times.

Memo to Jim Flaherty:

Dr. Flaherty, I have a suggestion for you. It's straight from the fiat currency playbook.

Just print one and one only quadrillion dollar banknote. The profit from printing that will offset the losses incurred from minting the one cent coin for the forseeable future. Have a nice day, you knucklehead, from all the homeless, all the mentally ill out on the street, all the charities and poor people, orphans and foster children, miserable third world victims and dispossessed who have now lost an important revenue stream.

I have seen people hold up a whole line at the market because of a few cents. This will not work. First of if you owe the store lest say 41 cents they are going to round it up to 45 cents but if they owe you 44 cents they are going to round it down to 40 cents. Either way you end up losing up to 4 cents on every purchase. Does not sound like much but that will add up over time. As for the little old lady locking down the whole store for a 2 cent pricing error this could mean war.

And another thing . . . this 11 million dollars that the finance minister says he will save by not minting one cent coins is going to disappear down the same sort of patronage hole that swallowed 1.2 billion dollars during the G8/G20 fiasco of a couple of years ago.

Memo to the Toronto Star

I'm waiting for your update on the last 247 million dollars of unexplained expenditures from that time. You've been doing really well lately with watchdog journalism, but I would appreciate it if you would spend a little more time on that missing money and a little less time gnawing on the ankle of Toronto's mayor.

(Yes, he's an oaf. I voted for the oaf. But remember, his mother-in-law shares his matrimonial domicile. Give the oaf a break and get back to substantive issues.)

Over and out.