No. of Recommendations: 2
I agree it's time for the penny to be retired. Are then any downsides?
I haven't researched this at all, but I'm going to make a guess here. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
My guess is that there is a lot of money to be made here, in aggregate, by rounding up transactions even a few pennies. It's not just a matter of us not having to carry around a couple pennies in our wallets. I mean, we're not talking just gasoline--it's all kinds of stuff, especially when you throw in sales tax that makes things uneven amounts even if the store prices them evenly.
I'm going to go out on another limb and guess that the extra money isn't going to go in favor of "the little guy". It's going to go in favor of the billionaires.
I think there's a lot of implementation issues here that need to be sorted out before just doing away with pennies. What if you're paying with a card? Or...bitcoin? Are we trying start down the road to go cashless? Is that a bad thing? I haven't researched the order at all, but I'm going to guess that like so many of Trump's orders so far, it is a hasty rush for publicity without doing much thinking through the ramifications, implementation issues and "unforeseen consequences".
