#like specifically because of how the change is being made. obv we've dropped denominations before it's fine

[girderednerve]

the treasury has been ordered as of today to cease production of the one-cent piece

there is a longstanding popular argument against the penny, which is almost exclusively about the cost of making pennies relative to their face value (they cost more than 1¢ to make, so the mint loses money on every penny struck). the problem of brassage (which i here use imprecisely to mean the cost of coining, rather than specifically mint fees) is very old, old enough that it's more or less contiguous with the cash economy in the west: there is tension between the practical needs of common people engaged in small-scale exchange & the cost to minting authorities to supply the small coinage those transactions require. i was interested in this problem as a medieval monetary policy question; despite the idea that monetary policy as an active matter was invented in the modern era & roughly coincides with the death of the gold standard, there were common debasements & reinforcements (that is, decreases & increases, respectively, to the bullion content of coins) for various reasons—mainly raising royal funds or improving currency circulation, but it varied. currency is never & has never been static, or the neutral condensation of exchange, or whatever; it's a political instrument. so who cares about the penny? let's save a little money. the problem that i see is that there is no initiative to adjust prices to make the penny obsolete at the cash register. the abolition of the penny in this haphazard way will result in a shortage of coinage that will affect people who are making small transactions in cash, which is why, incidentally, debasements were sometimes reasonably popular policy: people need money to do stuff. the argument that people no longer need physical cash to do stuff relies on the assumption that everyone is already receiving formal financial services from a bank & can just use a credit (or debit, but let's be real here) card, or i guess if you're a certain kind of weirdo the idea that we should all be using cryptocurrency. many people do not have access to these kinds of financial services, or choose to avoid consumer credit products for compelling personal reasons; also, these services interpolate another agent into exchange, which usually doesn't matter but sometimes matters a lot (consider, e.g., mastercard's position on pornography, or police access to bank statements), while cash transactions remain as a rule secure, anonymous, & independent. i have no emotional attachment to our particular coinage structure but if you are going to make it functionally impossible for people to pay with cash that's a genuine fucking problem?