Say Goodbye to the Penny
28th May 2025
Good riddance.
However, the legacy of the penny will last in our language. We will still ask a penny for thoughts. We will still throw in our 2 cents in discussions. A penny saved will even be a penny earned. We can still be penny-wise and pound-foolish. In tight times, we will still pinch pennies.
But pricing will likely shift. The old psychological trick of pricing things at 99 cents will persist. I saw a bag of chips the other day marked at $11.99. The memorable part is the 11, not the masked 12. That habit will likely go away. Even though only one in five transactions are in cash, it is likely that pricing habits will adapt in time.
However, aside from all these seeming trivialities, there is a gravely serious matter here. What it ultimately reveals is the monetary system’s mass theft of the public’s wealth. Here’s why.
Back in 1913, if you had 3 cents, you had the spending power that you would have if you had a dollar today. That’s a 33-fold increase in prices over a century and a decade of central banking and money printing to sustain an ever larger government and an ever bigger debt burden.
The loss of purchasing power in the money is the equivalent of a tax, a sneaky, surreptitious tax that masks its coercion in monetary depreciation.
By the way, I’m pretty sure that these numbers don’t capture the whole of it. They are drawn from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). I no longer trust it.
Say good-by to the dollar, really.