Melt a coin for me.
December 14th, 2006
So, I was pondering the significance of a penny I dropped today and left on the ground as a seepage of cash from the U.S. economy and I thought… how bad would it be if everyone in the US was losing a penny a month:
295,734,134 [people in US] * 12 [pennies / year] = $35,488,096.08 [per year]
So now I see this news (also note: Bush thinks redesigning currency for the blind would cause undue hardship to the vending machine industry now that’s foresight) via bb that the U.S. now has new rules outlawing the melting of pennies (since they are worth more as metal than as coinage, once you get past a certain volume even moreso for nickels). Please note, we live in a world where people get by picking through other people’s garbage, sometimes their neighbor’s garbage, sometimes another country’s garbage…
So back to the point, let’s say you had a scheme to make 12 cents for ever dollar in pennies you melt, off of free energy you get from burning the rubber insulation from thrown out electrical cables. You would have to melt $83,333.34 in pennies to make this crime break even with the maximum fine of $10,000 (this assumes that the 5 year jail time is nothing, because you have crazy time on your hands anyway)… And if you don’t get caught you have $10k. Now I would like to see how this could possibly be true in any way shape or form as it seems that the alloyed center and plated faces of pennies and nickels would be a monster to try and sort out from a stoichiometric standpoint of how do I get a mound of each individual metal in a high enough purity, but at this point you begin to see the absurdity of this legislation in the face of the first monetary guess of the US straight losing $34M in pennies each year.
According to my guesstimate of each man woman and child losing one penny per month in this great country, we have then ~425 people who could do this scheme and perhaps form an underground network of renegade metallurgists starting penny and nickel derived metal suppliers.
Or we could just drop the penny and nickel from currency in general, have their value go up as collectibles in eBayland and we all sit pretty. Or maybe mint a Franklin 18 cent piece for good measure and drop the dime.
Or we could actually get that inflation starts with the whole printing money (in all its various guises) thing that the government likes to do in order to buy stuff on a ‘no money down, no payments till somebody else is in charge’ payment plan that seems to work for just about everyone in the U.S.
Or we could just laugh.