Trump halt to penny production will hurt low-income folks
San José, CA – On Sunday, February 9, President Trump ordered the U.S. Mint to stop producing pennies.
Can he legally do this? Probably not, but Trump has shown a disregard for the law and even the Constitution that he swore to uphold. After all, he is a convicted criminal. It is Congress, not the president, nor the Federal Reserve Bank that determines the production of coins.
With fewer pennies in circulation, businesses will round off their prices. In Canada, they phased out their penny ten years ago, and required businesses to round off, both up and down, to the nearest five cents for the total cost, plus sales taxes. Without any regulation, businesses here in the United States would tend to round up, raising prices and giving a bump to inflation. Some of the greediest businesses could even round up the price of each item, and then round up the sales tax, to squeeze even more from the consumer. This would fall hardest on lower-income consumers who use cash.
Now it is true, as Trump said, that the penny cost more than one cent to produce and distribute, so that the government loses money on this; this has been going on for years. But I have to ask, if the goal is purely about saving money, why stop production of the penny and not the nickel? While it cost two cents more to produce a penny than its face value, it costs the U.S. Mint five cents more to produce a nickel.
Perhaps a difference is who is portrayed on each coin. The penny has the face of President Lincoln, who led the country in a war against the slave South. On the other hand, the nickel shows President Jefferson, who was a slave owner. Normally I wouldn’t think of this, but with Elon Musk and his Nazi salute, his support for neo-Nazis in Germany, and his band of racist and eugenicist interns in the DOGE, and Trump’s own bigotry, it is hard to argue that this had no role.