Give me Dimes, Dollar Coins & the Metric System
It’s nonsense that we still have pennies. A dime now buys what a penny did when I was a kid. I’m for abolishing the nickel too. Pennies and nickels both cost more to produce than their supposed worth. If dimes became the cheapest coin, then much could be saved in print and cash registers by eliminating the extra digit. Of course the quarter would have to be replaced by 20 or 50 cent pieces, since 25 is not evenly divisible by 10.
Apparently some fools are worried that stores would only round upward. That implies a complete misunderstanding of how markets work. Store owners don’t conspire with their competitors. In reality, if one store rounds up, its competitor down the block would round down to steal business. In Australia (where the 5 cent piece is now the smallest) individual items are still priced to the nearest cent, but when reaching the checkout the total is rounded appropriately to the nearest five cents. When I was serving in Vietnam during the late sixties, the smallest U.S. currency denomination was 5 cents. That caused us no concern.
Paper dollars are more costly to produce than metal ones, due to lack of durability which leads to a short time in circulation. One never really needs more than four of them. Dollar coins would be much easier to use in vending machines, assuming those who own the machines make them compatible.
The trick is for politicians to stop worrying that voters will throw them out if they change the coinage system. Certainly greater issues should be considered by the electorate. Somehow Congress managed to accept the need for digital TV transmission.
Now if only they would get real concerning the need to enforce the metric system in this country. Actually, it’s been the official U.S. system since the mid 19th century and was given a rather weak promotional push by Congress in the 1970’s. A ten-minute video would teach Americans the extremely simple measurement system used by the rest of the world. In the army we were forced to use it and it became natural quite quickly. Let’s abandon our stuck in the mud attitudes.
|