The sentiments expressed in the Seattle Times’ pointless editorial about the new penny design and the old one it replaces, pretty much sums up my sentiment toward our new, electronic media transcending the old, print-based stuff:
In the meantime, listen for the complaints, and then know how beloved the interloping new coin will be to future generations. Change happens.
Yup. Change happens. Time to stop subsidizing the old dying dailies with with special interest tax breaks, and move on.
A false equivalency.
The new penny is more interesting, more trustworthy, and ultimately has a much greater value than the Seattle Times.
They’ll reolace the Indian Heads in my loafers as soon as I can get a few.
Goldy sure does spend a lot of time talking about something that is “irrelevant.”
They do have a nice piece on the international aspects of the Drug War. Maybe our political class will learn something.
Why do we HAVE a F**KING penny?
Virtually no ‘machines’ take pennies (soda, parking meters, etc).
It’s worth has shrank to near worthless. It was introduced in 1793. Think was penny bought THEN! Given inflation it worth roughly 12.5 times less then when it was introduced.
Get rid of it. It’s a waste of metal and money.
Sorry…TYPO…I meant that penny is worth roughly 32.5 times less then when it was introduced.
re 5 to add to you point. The value of the dollar stayed the same from about 1820 until the late 1940s when inflation started to be accepted. Then really taking off after Nixon closed the gold window, but we shouldn’t blame the Federal Reserve, now should we.
I read the editorial/opinion/elementary school essay.
Talk about emailing it in, jeez.
Maybe Joni Balter will talk about the penny on KUOW this Friday, oh, I’ll get the podcast.
Ya know, there is quite possibly going to be a raging war on the Ivory Coast, how about an obligatory “war is bad” editorial?
Kinda sad that a $150 million printing plant is used to publish stuff like this. Clearly a misallocation of economic resources. Fortunately, we can count on market forces to correct such misallocations, given enough time.
@3 Not nearly as much as you.
@7 The gold standard was a principal cause of the Great Depression. Nixon was right to take us off it. By limiting the money supply to the gold supply, you ensure the economy can’t grow.
Tea Party idiots blast the bank bailout and want to restore the gold standard. Both of those actions are prescriptions for economic disaster. The bank bailout cost taxpayers nothing, in fact made a profit for the government, and saved us from a 1930s depression. Flustered because the economy was saved from a total meltdown by enlightened government policymakers, the Tea Parties now want to take a second shot at subjecting us to another Great Depression by restoring the gold standard that caused the original Great Depression. These people hate America and want our country to fail.
Bluecollar @7,
First of all, that’s simply not true. The CPI only goes back to 1914, so prior data is harder to come by, but there were plenty of inflationary and deflationary periods prior to the late 1940’s, and even period of high inflation in the 1970’s is nothing compared to what we saw in the 1920’s, prior to the Great Depression. In fact, inflation has been relatively low and stable since the mid-1980’s, and we’re still off the Gold Standard.
Second, a little inflation is not necessarily a bad thing. Would you rather have 2 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment, or 4 percent inflation and 6 percent unemployment? Most Americans would benefit from the latter, but the wealthy elite in this country (ie, those with substantial assets) would prefer the former. There is also a generational conflict here, as younger households are those that generally hold debt (and thus benefit by inflation) while older households generally have assets.
@8 Yeah, Ivory Coast is about to blow up, so look for coffee and chocolate prices to jump.
The gold standard makes next to no sense to me.
Even Ronnie Raygun’s favorite economist Milton Friedman thought it was useless.
Don’t take my word for it. Watch the man explain it himself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBCDS-y8vc
@5: Yeah, they should get rid of the penny, and just force stores to round up/down to the nearest nickel. And they should just out-and-out replace the dollar bill with a coin while they’re at it.
LOL. A look at tomorrow’s ST headlines:
http://www.misfitopia.com/uplo....._11337.jpg
Without pennies we’d be forced to buy things like, say, hammers for $11 instead of $10.99.
I am not advocating that the U.S. return to a gold standard. This url, http://oregonstate.edu/cla/pol.....2005-1.pdf, is of a graph developed at Oregon State Universities. The information shown in the graph is available from a number of sources including the Federal Reserve and is pretty reliable.
Secondly inflation is just another welfare program for Wall Street since those boys get first crack at the dollars which then trickle down to the rest of us.
As for Roger’s comment that the gold standard is what caused the Great Depression there is a recent paper from the NBER which suggest that maybe France caused the Depression by hoarding gold. Others have suggested that the seeds of the Depression were planted in WWI, or the Smoot-Hawley tariff, or the Federal Reserve made a bad situation worse when it shrunk the money supply, or a combination of all of these. Frankly I don’t think anyone knows.
I’m always on the lookout for wheat pennies. Though last struck in 1958, there are still some of them in circulation.
My ex collects them, so I send them off to her every once in a while. It’s pretty rare, though … since moving here in 2001, I don’t think I’ve found more than about 3 or 4 of them.
Uh, why are pennies being made? I have thrown away every penny that I have received for over 30 years.
They are totally unnecessary, inefficient and wasteful.
Pennies don’t need to be redesigned, they need to be abolished.
Without pennies, the Arco station could not charge .9% of a penny on a gallon of gas.